From "Songs of Innocence"

How strange are the currents of poetic and artistic fame! When the author of our Poem of the Week, William Blake, died at the age of 72, he had sold a grand total of 30 copies of what is now his best-known work, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I’m including today two short poems from the Songs of Innocence, featuring the image of the lamb, our Word of the Week. But Blake has not been the only genius quite unknown or at least unappreciated in his time. The most innovative poet of the Victorian age, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had only a few friends who really knew about his work, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to one of them, Robert Bridges, who published his old friend’s work posthumously — and so powerful has Hopkins’ influence been on English poetry in the twentieth century, especially upon religious poetry, that it is hard to imagine that the great Seamus Heaney would have been quite so muscular and musical without him.

One of the journalists and essayists I admire most deeply, Malcolm Muggeridge, held that Blake was on the side of the angels, not for his philosophy or his theology — Muggeridge himself, like Blake, was never fond of abstractions or of systems of thought — but for his profound humanity and his deep fellow feeling for all creatures that suffer. “A Robin Redbreast in a cage / Sets all Heaven in a rage,” says Blake, in a couplet that Muggeridge thought was a touchstone of moral insight. Yes, I do want sometimes to grab that visionary printer and poet by the collar and shout, “Use your reason, man!” But Blake was — how to put it? — inconsistent in the best way: he lived according to the best of what he believed, no matter the cost; and what he believed that was hurtful or absurd, he did not follow in his life. Thus this man who dabbled with the idea of free love was in fact a most faithful husband. The woman he married, Catherine, was illiterate when he married her, and it was he who taught her to read and write. In fact, she was his close artistic collaborator. For that’s also what we esteem Blake for, his incomparable engravings and prints, bravely out of the mainstream of the arts in his day, and never yielding an inch to what he considered to be a low or merely mercantile vision of art.

And we should give Blake a good deal of credit for the evils he did see in his English society. Between Blake and Dickens, there are no greater and more astute critics of what the Industrial Revolution was turning the English countryside into, let alone the grimy slums of London or the new manufacturing metropolises such as Leeds and Manchester. For Blake it wasn’t a matter of aesthetics. He entered into the imagination of the poor chimney-sweep, and of other children robbed of their innocence by the cruelties of the world about them. In this regard he is like Shakespeare, who by comparison with his contemporaries makes frequent use of children in his plays — and who never leaves unavenged cruelty against a child.

In these poems of Innocence, though they are going to be offset by the darker songs of Experience, we must credit Blake with a depth of feeling that is hard for us to imagine, we who have lambs all over birthday cards for babies and little children. He may admire and fear that “Tyger” in his Song of Experience about that beast, but he also weeps for the goodness and the innocence of the lamb. Blake could be fiercely satirical, but he was never cynical. The prints accompanying these songs are, I think, proof of that deep feeling. I’ll also note that for Blake, the poems were songs, too; in meters you might hear in a hymn, or in a folk song. Please, let us know what you think — let’s have a conversation about these poems, apparently so easy to understand!

Illustration by William Blake. Public Domain.

Piping down the valleys wild,
    Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
    And he laughing said to me:

‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’
    So I piped with merry cheer.
‘Piper, pipe that song again.’
    So I piped: he wept to hear.

‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
    Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’
So I sung the same again,
    While he wept with joy to hear.

‘Piper, sit thee down and write
    In a book, that all may read.’
So he vanished from my sight;
    And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
    And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
    Every child may joy to hear.

THE LAMB

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
    Little lamb, who made thee?
    Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are callèd by His name.
    Little lamb, God bless thee!
    Little lamb, God bless thee!

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