Little Lamb, who made thee

The poem “The Lamb” was written by William Blake. He was a precursor of English Romanticism, a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries.

To call a writer Romantic has traditionally been to signal an interest in such categories as genius, nature, childhood, and imagination, perhaps along with some assumed response to the French Revolution. Those who wrote in the Romantic period but wrote about other things or demonstrated other priorities have then come to be, not Romantic in this particular sense.

Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism.

William Blake based his works in the style of Romanticism. In Romanticism, the “rules” hanging over poetry were dropped and a piece of work could become, as Blake described, “an embodiment of the poet’s imagine vision”

Blake’s first printed collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. (9)

After making a short reference about the romanticism, I want to say that the aim of this paper is to make an analysis of the poem by my point of view, saying what the poem transmits to me and showing what is the main missage that William Blake wanted to trasmit.

Starting with my analysis, I would like to say that the title of the poem gives us little information about what is going to be about. At first sight, it seems that the speaker of “The Lamb” is a child who is adressing to an animal, in this case, a lamb. It is if it was written by and for children because of the childish repetitions and the selection of words which could satisfy any audience under the age of five. In fact, one of the most important features of Romanticism is the emphasis on the innocence of childhood because children recollect the innocence and purity of a higher world. As we know, Blake put empashis on the innocence so he chose children for his poems to transmit this sensation.

"The Lamb" has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. The rhyme is masculine because the stress is in the final syllable of the word (thee, feed, meed, etc.) The repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza makes these lines into a refrain, and helps to give the poem its song quality. Another feature that proves that the poem is inspired by children is its simplicity and the continous repetitions that convert the poem into a children’s song. It is a straightforward poem because it has a simple vocabulary and it’s clear to understand. Its simplicity contributes to emphasize a certaing sense of irony referred to the ignorance or innocence of the children. I want to say that despite the simplicity of the poem, it doesn’t mean that it has a simple analysis.

In the first stanza, almost all the sentences are questions that the child asks to the lamb. He asks for its origins, the way of feeding, etc. From my point of view, I think that in these lines Blake expresses his doubts about where we come from. This is a common situation among people. Throughout these lines, it seems that Blake feels confused and with a sensation of uncertainty. We have a William Blake with many doubts.

“Little lamb, who made thee?”

In the second stanza it seems that the child understands that he will not have an answer, so he decides to answer his own questions. Then, it converts them into rethorical ones. I think that this situation is a common fact that people usually do. People usually answer their own questions when these ones have no answer.

“Little lamb, I’ll tell thee”

When the child answers his question about the origins of the lamb, he gives the response of “he calls himself a lamb”. He is referring to Jesus because he was also named “the Lamb”. The theme which predominates along this poem is the religion, in fact, the poetry of Blake is characterised by expressing strong religious influences. Furthermore, when the child says “he became a little child”, it seems that the image of the child is also associated with Jesus. So, in this poem we can see that there’s a lot of symbolism.

The following sentence affirms that the child and the lamb are both associated with Jesus:

“We are called by His Name”

Other peculiar things are the repetition of the animal’s name each time the child speaks to it and the sensation of spontaneity that transmits. It is perhaps in order to reflect the ideas of childhood and innocence in a better way.

“Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee”

Finally, the poem ends with the child giving a blessing on the lamb where the main theme (religion) is emphasized:

“Little Lamb, God bless the thee!”

So, it can be clearly seen that the main theme of this poem is the religion, specially the Christianity. Blake uses the lamb and the child to represent the situation described.

This poem, as I have said above, was written by William Blake, a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. He was born in London, where he spent most of his life. (5.1)

William Blake wrote Songs of Innocence which was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title Songs of Innocence and Experience showing the two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The main theme of the poems in this work came from Blake's belief that children lost their innocence as they grew older and were influenced by the ways of the world. Blake believed that children were born innocent. They grew to become experienced as they were influenced by the beliefs and opinions of adults. Most of the poems in Songs of Innocence are written from the perspective of children. The poems are, without any doubt, inspired by them. In Songs of Innocence, the innocence is like a world without frontiers, full of energy and symbols which the child is identified with. It refers to the songs for children written in the XVIII century (5.2)

The poem "The Lamb" was published in Songs of Innocence. This dramatizes the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Blake admired the innocence of children and though that self awareness could be realized through the recapturing of the imagination of a child. In the poem, Blake is putting stress on on the symbolism behind the animals through repetition. Blake's poem seems to be mainly about God's love shown in his care for “The Lamb” and the child and about the apparent paradox, that God became both child and Lamb (Canciones de Inocencia y Experiencia, 18)

It’s necessary to situate the time when Blake’s play was published. The publication was in the year of the first French Revolution (1789), a watershed historical event that drew the age of unlimited monarchies to a close and ushered in the tumultuous 19^th century. (5.3)

Blake's political radicalism intensified during these years, in fact, he has been called Britain’s greatest revolutionary artist. Many critics say that Blake’s early enthusiasm for the French Revolution transformed itself into a Romantic concern with the creative power of imagination. He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of institutionalized religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form. (William Blake, 133)

Despite of his interest in politics, he is described as a man more concerned with spiritual than political matters. Blake was convinced that religion profoundly affects every aspect of human life- political, economic, psychological, and cultural- and that its influence has generally not been a positive one. He detected flawed religious thinking at the root of most of the social disorders happened in the England of his time, and found that even the highest virtues associated with religion, were manipulated for destructive ends. One of the main themes of Songs of Innocence is the spiritual truth which is well represented in my elected poem, “the Lamb”. In this one there is a closer relationship with God. (William Blake, 150)

We can see this in some examples of the poem: “He calls Himself a lamb” or “Little lamb, God bless thee”. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. The companion poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is "The Tiger”; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on religion that includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable. These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account than either offers independently. They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of innocence and experience he projects.

The life of William Blake became a legend even before he died. The origin of his legend can be traced in several biographical essays preceding Gilchrist’s Life, which present Blake in a startling variety of lights. Gilchrist provided a portrait of Blake the innocent- the “divine child” who grew into the unworldly artist; Swinburne (a Victorian poet) countered with Blake the anti-moralist and prophet of sexual liberation, while at the end of the century W.B.Yeats (Irish poet) presented Blake as an Irish seer out of the Celtic twilight- mystic, symbolist, and occultist. (William Blake, 19)

In this age, when read, he was not understood. The great poem Wordsworth said “ there was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than Lord Byron and Walter Scott”. In the time of French Revolution there wer many who saw signs that the Judgement of the Apocalypse was at hand, but Blake was isolated and his thought was just understood by few people. He drew on unfamiliar theological traditions of biblical prophecy. Blake’s thought evolved in his later prophectic books, often inverting conventinoal religioius values in a way deriving from 18^th-century satirical traditions of reversed perspective. Scholarship has made the later Blake less obscure, but it will never communicate as other Romantic poetry does. ( A History of English Literature, 219)

Typically Blake's Songs of Innocence, as we know, is understood to be a selection of poems for children. “The Lamb” is full of things that are still present in our world. The main theme is the childhood, which Blake represents through a child who asks questions to a lamb. The situation of a child talking to an animal is a believable one that children still do. The most significant question is; “who made thee?” The child’s question is a simple one, and yet the child is also tapping into the timeless questions that all human beings have, about their own origins and the nature of creation. These are common questions that not only children ask themselves, these ones are questions that each human being has. This situation of uncertainty is still present in every day life of today society. And then, this is all related with religion because our origins are always associated with God. Nowadays spirituals matters are still in people’s mind. So, here we have one of the most important interests of Blake; the religion.

I would like to say that I have chosen this poem because when I read it I found it peculiar. At first sight, it seems to be a simple poem without any kind of peculiarities but I realized that it had quite aspects to analize. What have attracted my attention are the questions that the child asks to the lamb. They are common questions which the human beings ask themselves. Who has never asked about their own existence? This is a question that has always caused a lot of curiosity on people. I think that a good way of represeting this situation is the figure of child. They reflect well the sense of innocence in which all the people live.

William Blake wrote this poem to remark his interest in religion. Furthermore, I think that he tried to show his own doubts and his uncertainty through this poem. I mean, the message he wanted to transmit is the uncertainty in which people lived, including himself.