The Lamb

The Lamb is the Innocence antitype poem to The Tyger, which I will be posting shortly. The lamb is a symbol of meekness, mildness, gentleness, fragility and of course innocence. Blake wanted to convey to his reader what he believed to be true Christianity, not the doctrines preached by organised religion at the time, and so portrays two biblical images his public would recognise: the child and the lamb. But in doing so, Blake hoped that he could make his reader question how these images were commonly understood.

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & 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,

Make all the vales rejoice:

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,

Little Lamb Ill tell thee;

He is called 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 called by his name.

Little Lamb God bless thee,

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Form & Structure

The structure of the poem is two stanzas composed of five rhyming couplets, and has an apostrophic form, meaning that the poem addresses an absent person.

The form contributes to the effect of naivety, as if it were a child talking to an animal.

The poem also follows a question and answer style, the form is a catechism. Catechisms were used by the Catholic Church as a way of helping children in memorising information. 
While stanza one is rural and descriptive. Stanza two meanwhile covers abstract and spiritual matters, providing an explanation to these questions through analogy.

The poem has a basic trochaic rhythm alternating between trimester and tetrameter to connote the simplistic nature of the child narrator. It also gives it a similar rhythm to nursery rhymes.

Stanza One

The first stanza, despite the punctuation of a question mark, is composed entirely of questions in each line asking the lamb if it is aware of its divine origin, showing the innocence, if not naivety of the child speaker.

The narrator uses diction of a comforting nature, describing the lamb as possessing “clothing of delight”, being “wooly bright” and having a “tender voice”. This semantic field connotes the objective goodness of the lamb, but also anthropomorphises the lamb and links it to Christ, as Christ was described in the Bible as being born with wooly hair.

This semantic field of calming diction in “stream” and “mead” is typical of the pastoral tradition to present an idyllic rural scene, these adjectives describing a scene of perfection.

Blake also uses softened sounds, such as in “rejoice”, “voice” and “vales” to mimic the bleating of a lamb and the lisping of a child, further highlighting the innocent nature of the speaker.

The stanza ends as a rhetorical question, “Little Lamb who made thee”, to create a warm and harmonious tone. “made thee” forms a spondee intending to slow the reader down, and makes the line more emphatic.
Blake is aking questions about creation to remind society to consider these things, as they were, in his mind, to immersed within the Revolutionary War, the Industrial Revolution, etc. 

Stanza Two

The child then takes on the qualities of the lamb as they describe Jesus, so Blake links Jesus, the lamb and the child together as a means of encouraging his reader to let go of Experience and cleanse the doors of perception. As critic Brassington has noted:

“There is the implied love of, or sympathy for the innocent perfection of childhood before the Fall into experience.”

He begins by assuring “Little Lamb I’ll tell thee”, the repetition creating a confident and self-assured tone, but this also highlights the vulnerability of innocence, in that it forces us to blindly accept faith without question, while limiting the human understanding of God. This was because Blake believed:

“Without contraries there is no Progression.”

Innocence is only one contrary, while Experience is the other, and so with Innocence our image of God is limited to the tender, gentle creator. He describes him as “meek” and “mild”, which are not necessarily negative, despite lacking energy and power, and therefore being vulnerable and open to danger, like one who is divorced from Experience.

Blake wanted to present the positive aspects of conventional Christianity, the beliefs that did not lead to suffering. Suffering because of religion was only the result of corruption from religion, contemporary society and the State. In this poem, Blake presents an untainted vision of religion.

The repetition of the final line “Little Lamb God bless thee” gives it a song-like quality, almost as if it were a religious hymn.

So that’s The Lamb covered, once you’re comfortable in analysing this Song of Innocence, I would suggest comparing and contrasting it with its Experience counterpart The Tyger. But personally I would have a break and grab a cuppa in between!