Lamb

The lamb is a symbol of innocence, ignorance, purity, and self justification. In William Blake’s poem The Lamb, children are biblically innocent and the speaker contrast himself to the higher divinity. In this interpretation of children the speaker may possibly be trying to use ignorance as an excuse for sin in his life. The lamb’s natural gifts are clearly envied by the speaker, the gifts being food, shelter, and happiness. William Blake may have used this scene of fertile valleys to allow the reader to also feel the envy towards the lamb’s peaceful existence. “The lamb by no fault of its own is prosecuted by speaker, later to be found incoherent with his own tortures and suffrages”(Paananem 40).

William Blake used direct dictation through his poem, “The Lamb”, in distributing his theorem, which we, humans, seek to find peace within our selves only after reestablishing our identity with something pure. Humans are biblically damned to eternal unhappiness, the past was the beginning of future’s pain. The biblical reference to Adam and Eve is subtle but clear enough with the envy portrayed by the speaker towards the lamb. The eternal suffering will not cease until humans take acknowledgment of their own faults and own sins. The speaker is seeking answers to his questions, about how the lamb gained such natural innocence here. There are no clear answers to any of the speaker’s questions throughout the poem, causing the readers to stir within themselves the answer. The lamb was only a conveyor

of unattainable innocence. “Blake’s wordage and dictation throughout the poem is lyrical but also dead, in the sense that Blake spoke of things to narrowly”(O’ Neil 45). The lamb the natural ignorance, innocence, and ability to live amply; a thing we, humans, will always envy. The nautral ignorance and suffering will always continue to exist as long as we are living on this secular world, but will cease when we join God’ s kingdom.

William Blake’s poem, “The Lamb" is broken into two stanzas. Both stanzas have ten lines each. In the first part, each line rhymes with the next. There are a total of five rhyming parts in the first stanza. In the second stanza “name” and “Lamb” do not rhyme, but the other lines have the rhyming endings. The first two and the last two lines of each stanza are either the same or close to being the same. This is almost like a chorus to a song. In the first stanza “The Lamb”, William Blake opens with "Little