William Blake's "The Lamb" Is Part of Essay

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William Blake's "The Lamb" is part of his manuscript for Songs of Innocence (Erdman, 1988, p. 72). As such, there is a light, jubilant tone rendered throughout, which pervades the poem's theme, subject, narrator, and setting. Within this poem, an unidentified narrator directly addresses a lamb. The principle motif that this work revolves about is the time honored conceit of a lamb representing Jesus Christ and the mercy and kindness of God himself. Therefore, this poem is principally about the goodness and divinity of all creatures as evinced by their innate connection towards God, and Blake utilizes various aspects of the poem's setting, mood, title, narrator, and literary devices to reinforce this principle theme.

Structurally, Blake divides the poem into a pair of stanzas, both of which use a copious amount of anaphora. The primary stanza is about the literal lamb whom the narrator is addressing; the second stanza is about the figurative lamb which the literal one represents, Jesus Christ. The repetition of the word "thee" occurs repeatedly throughout the first stanza, appears in all but two of the stanzas' 10 lines, and underscores the fact that the author is emphasizing the titular lamb as the principle point of comparison in this commonly found conceit. The following quotation readily demonstrates this fact. "Dost thou know who made thee/Gave thee life & bid thee feed" (Blake, 1789). In this passage, the author uses the word thee three times in a span of seven words, to demonstrate the fact that the poem is about a lamb. The frequent references to the lamb's creator and its bestower of its "feed" and "life" refers to the divinity, which was both responsible for this largess and is represented by the lamb itself.

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This latter fact is well demonstrated in the second stanza by the fact that the author repeats the word "he" as much as he does "thee" in the first stanza. "He," of course, refers to the Jesus, the metaphorical lamb of God. Therefore, the lamb is both literally and figuratively divine in this poem.

A close examination of the diction of "The Lamb" reveals crucial aspects of the author's usage of the narrator and the overall mood of the poem. There is an overall jubilant tone to the language in the poem, which helps to provide a positive mood of wonder and redemption. The narrator describes the wool of the lamb, for instance, as "clothing of delight" and "bright"; in fact, all aspects of the author's appraisal of the lamb -- including the description of its voice as "tender" reinforce the joyous mood of the tone (Blake 1789). Although Blake provides little information about the identity of the narrator, one can infer that the narrator delighting so much in the nature f the lamb is a child itself. The child-like fascination for all of its features (including its voice and its wool) is underscored by the lone description the narrator gives of himself, in which he states "I a child & thou a lamb" (Blake, 1789). This passage is critical to the interpretation of the poem, because within it the narrator proclaims himself to be a child, much….....

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