William Blake: Songs of Innocence
GENERAL COMMENTS
Form
It is probably true that many or most of these songs were actually performed as songs by Blake, to tunes he composed. But some are more obviously designed for song than others.
There are poems which could, roughly or precisely, be called narrative poems: Introduction, The Shepherd, The Ecchoing Green, The Little Black Boy, The Blossom, The Chimney Sweeper, The Little Boy Lost, The Little Boy Found, The Little Girl Lost, The Little Girl Found, Holy Thursday, Nurse’s Song, A Dream.
Some of these narrative poems are examples of other poetic genres, such as the pastoral poems (The Shepherd, The Ecchoing Green, The Blossom) and it would not be wrong to call them only marginal examples of the form of narrative poem. The story is not so important as the portrayal of a state of peace, an evocation of the Garden of Eden, of a state of antediluvian innocence (before the Fall!) perhaps, and the purpose is to evoke or create the idea that men and women can exist in a state of harmony with nature, a state of acceptance of their own human nature, and rejoice unselfconsciously in the beauties of Nature at large.
Other poems have narrative elements, but story-telling is subsumed within a different purpose: for example, Spring, which is more of a celebratory effusion than a narrative poem, or The Lamb, which is more of a dramatic monologue designed to embody the voice of a child’s religious certitude.
It is generally true to say that the poems are short, based around short lines and short verses.
The poems which have no significant narrative element (Laughing Song, A Cradle Song, The Divine Image, Night, Infant Joy, On Another’s Sorrow) tend to be poetic effusions, the majority of which lead us to religious thoughts. The Laughing Song is perhaps an attempt to incorporate into verse a feeling of unrestrained exuberance ("Exuberance is Beauty," remember!) or (in Blakean terms) Energy; A Cradle Song is a lullaby and a meditation on Christ as child; The Divine Image is a prayer; Infant Joy a dramatic dialogue between parent and two-day-old child, an attempt to dramatise the feelings that exist before words can lend their shapes (and distortions, perhaps?) to experience, and it ends in an expression of good wishes, rather like the kind of thing you might put into a card given to celebrate a new birth; On Another’s Sorrow is an uncompromising attestation of Christian faith.
So, in the non-narrative poems, religion and purity of feeling dominate, and, of course, these sorts of ideas also dominate the narratives to a very large extent.
The forms have been chosen, as I see it, to enable Blake to create a wide palette of innocent voices, voices laughing unselfconsciously, declaring simplistic ideas of duty, celebrating nature, experiencing complete religious certainty, telling stories which all have happy endings – moralistic stories, attesting to God’s control and merciful purposes perhaps – and, by doing so, to let his audience hear – and enjoy – the purity and power of that Innocence which (perhaps) we all secretly cherish within our hearts, however much Experience may batter us later in our lives.
Variation in form is a major tool Blake uses to keep us fresh and responsive as we work through the Songs of Innocence.
STRUCTURE
Variation of structure is another such tool.
Most of the poems in the Songs of Innocence as a whole (15 out of the 22 songs: Introduction, The Shepherd, The Little Black Boy, The Chimney Sweeper, The Little Boy Lost, The Little Boy Found, The Little Girl Lost, The Little Girl Found, Laughing Song, A Cradle Song, The Divine Image, Holy Thursday, Nurse’s Song, A Dream and On Another’s Sorrow) are based around a stanza of four lines.
Some of these, however, use an ABAB rhyme scheme, some an ABCB rhyme scheme.
The line length for these four-line stanzas also varies from 5 syllables (A Cradle Song) through 7 syllables (Introduction) through 10 in Laughing Song to a massive 14 (Holy Thursday). Some maintain regular line lengths: some poems (e.g. Little Boy Lost) follow a line of 9 syllables with one of 5, and repeat the pattern to make up the four lines.
One The Schoolboy, uses a stanza of five lines.
Two use a stanza of six lines (The Blossom, Infant Joy).
One uses an eight line stanza (Night) and one a nine line stanza (Spring)
Two more poems have a stanza of 10 lines (Ecchoing Green and The Lamb).
(If you count The Voice of the Ancient Bard as a song of innocence (printed as such in some editions, one as late as 1815), then one poem has a single stanza of 11 lines.)
For each poem we study, you need to be able to pinpoint how the rhythm works, together with the shape of stanza chosen, to achieve what the poem manages to do.
LANGUAGE
Most of the language is understandably simple, some of it is even simplistic. This is entirely understandable given Blake’s overarching purpose of trying to let us hear the songs that innocence sings and to hear them ringing out as clear as a bell for our sensual and emotional enjoyment.
There are, however, some complexities of expression here and there, which we will encounter even in the Innocence section of our study texts.
of these poems (considered as a whole group) is based around the lyric form. "Lyric" meant originally a set of words designed to be accompanied by a lyre, and is nowadays taken to mean something like ‘words for a song’.
