The Lamb
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream & o’er the mead,
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, 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, & he is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, & thou a lamb,
We are callèd by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
William Blake
Nothing is harder to comment on than a piece of art which successfully pretends to artlessness, to be “merely” transcribing what a voice utters — or seems to utter: in real life nobody actually converses in rhyme, but readers of rhymed or rhythmic poetry accept the pentameters of “To be or not to be” as Hamlet’s “natural” way of speaking, just as audiences of opera accept the convention that whatever Rodolfo is “saying” to Mimi will be conveyed in song. In the rhyming lines of William Blake’s “The Lamb,” we hear a single voice speaking, in rhyme; there is no narrator, no editorial comment, no concluding summary. And no self-revelation by the artist-author.
Although Blake was fiercely concerned with politics, and within a few years was to write long poems called The French Revolution and America, his little illustrated booklet called (and I imitate the original typeface) SONGS of Innocence, which appeared in 1789, offered poems of a simplicity that was hailed then (and sometimes even now) as “pure,” “childlike,” “transparent,” “sweet,” and of course “innocent.” The Songs utterly baffled me — as the productions of a grown man — when I first encountered them in high school, and I set them aside in favor of any poem (from Milton’s “Nativity Ode” to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) which seemed properly and deeply reflective in thought and language. (Poems are meant, said Stevens, “to help us live our lives,” and in high school that was what I wanted from them.)
Later I decided, before even entering a doctoral program, that I wanted to write a dissertation on W. B. Yeats, but I knew that I had first to understand Blake. Yeats, in his twenties, had co-edited Blake’s works, and derived from them aspects of his own theory of poetry. When I entered Harvard’s graduate program, seeing that no course was addressing Blake in detail, I asked one of my professors to direct a semester-long “reading course” on Blake for me. Since he generously agreed, we met every week and read all of Blake’s poetry. My teacher tolerated our initial pursuit, but when my later papers began to concern Blake’s long “prophetic books” — mythological, obscure, and stormy fantasies about weirdly named people (“Oothoon”) living in weirdly named places (“Golgonooza”) — he groaned and said, “Helen, the awful things you are having me read!” But Yeats, following Blake’s declaration that “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s,” indeed developed his own erratic mythological system, called A Vision, and my (imperfect) absorption of Blake gave me an entrance to writing on it. (My dissertation on Yeats became my first book, and I am still grateful to that reluctant teacher.)
Blake’s long poems, composed, like oratorios, of arias and choruses, are accompanied by his stunning but mysterious illustrations. (They may be found online in The Blake Archive.) They puzzled me, but I was still more puzzled by the ostentatious simplicity of “The Lamb” and other poems in his Songs of Innocence. Was there more to this artless art than I could see? I had faith in the sincerity of Blake’s promise to his readers in Jerusalem, composed between 1804 and 1820:
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
But how to find the golden string? An unforgettable lyric usually startles by some original feature, some conceptual or linguistic thread calling attention to itself. With intuition and investigation, the clue glows, the golden ball is wound up, and the poem assembles itself into an intelligible structure. But I could not find, for many years, any such golden string of entrance into “The Lamb.”