![]() ![]() "The Lamb" was published in 1789 as part of a larger work, Songs of Innocence, which is itself part of Songs of Innocence and Experience. ![]() The rhymes are gratingly simple and the speaker repeats himself constantly. It sounds like something you might see embroidered beneath an image of the unbearably cute creature and placed in a pretty frame to hang on someone's bathroom wall. If you're reading "The Lamb" out of a textbook or anthology, you might even think it's a bit, well, boring. But we're not going to lie, this poem doesn't exactly make us want to head to the nearest petting zoo. We learn Blake's two main reasons why lambs are so awesome: 1) they are soft, happy, and make cool noises 2) they are associated with Jesus Christ, whom the speaker of this poem regards as the savior of the world. "The Lamb" takes us to the heart of the matter. If you gave him a Rorschach test (where you look at a random pattern of ink and say what comes to mind) Blake would probably say, "Lamb…Another lamb…newborn lamb…Lamb doing gymnastics…" In his poem titled "The Chimney Sweep," he writes that the shape of some poor kid's shaved head is "curled like a lamb's back." This is definitely one of the stranger metaphors we have encountered in any classic poem. Judging by his collection Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake was obsessed with lambs. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |