"The Lamb"

Paper Summary:

This paper studies the poem "The Lamb" and its Christian symbolism.
William Blake personifies the lamb as Christ marveling over God's creations yet through a child's innocent eyes. It also discusses Blake's other works such as other poems in the Songs of Innocence. It portrays the sheep-shepherd relationship in pastoralism which Blake uses in many of his poems.

From the Paper:

"In the poem "The Lamb," William Blake distinguishes his unique style through the incorporation of religious symbolism, creative lines, and simplistic patterns. "The Lamb" was published as part of a series of poems in 1789 titled the "Songs of Innocence;" actually, he wrote "The Lamb" and the other works as part of a series of lyrics. The entire work represents an enlightened state in Blake's life, and it was written before a contrary, darker state of mind in the 1793 sequel, the Songs of Experience. Blake was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, a writer who gave Christianity a mystical interpretation, and that influenced is found in Blake's work, like "The Lamb," poems that were more simplistic in style and nature before he became more contrition and prophetic in the Songs of Experience. Through simplistic structure, he chose the narrator of a child, as in this poem, told through childlike eyes, speaking of the innocence of all us, and that the lamb is Christ, marveling over God's creations. It describes how "the lambs graze upon the cropped grass beneath the images, the dramatic perspectives and continual allusiveness of these lyrics has meant that they have been endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted, these are not poems, these are discrete works of art in which the words are only one element in a unified design" (Ackroyd, 122). Blake loved the "obtuse. He will have nothing said against superstition, which is "ignorant honesty" beloved of god and man" (Erdman, 116)."

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