The lamb Poem Summary and the lamb William blake analysis. Read the notes of the poem The Lamb by William Blake. It is speical notes for the BA English Students of Smester 3 of BBMKU and VBU University. Do you have any questions or requests, go to the contact section.
The Lamb Poem
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,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll 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.
The lamb by William blake summary
A child tells the lamb, asking who created it and whether the lamb knows it. The lamb has ‘clothing of delight’ because of its wool, which is used to make human clothes. The lamb is innocent: it has a tender voice that brings happiness to everything in the surrounding valleys.
The child responds to his question by saying that God made the lamb through Jesus Christ. God/Jesus is gentle and meek, just like the lamb. Jesus was born to Mary and became human when he became a little child.
The lamb William blake analysis
‘The Lamb’ like one of William Blake’s most accessible and short poems, but the nearest analysis uncovers hidden meanings and symbolism. The solution to this mystery is: ‘The Lamb made the lamb.’ Christ, known as the ‘Lamb of God,’ formed all living creatures, including the little lamb – for Christ is not only God’s son but God’s Creator.
In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker being child and keeping innocence like a child rising questions about the lamb-who made it, who gave it life and its woolly coat, and its pleasing bleating ‘voice’ that seems to make the surrounding valleys a happier place.
Further, the speaker himself answers his question: ‘I know who made you.’ It was the Lord God, Jesus Christ, who also – funnily enough – calls himself by the name of ‘Lamb.
At several points in the New Testament, Jesus is called a lamb: in John 1:29, John the Baptist, upon seeing Jesus, proclaims, ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ In the final book of the New Testament, the Jesus-as-lamb metaphor returns in Revelation.
But if both the literal lamb addressed in the poem and the ‘Lamb of God’ that is Jesus Christ are associated with each other in the poem, then the poem’s speaker – in being a child – is linked to both: a child is a young person just as a lamb is a young sheep. They are also connected by their innocence.
But the word ‘meek’ in the second stanza recalls Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth’ (Matthew 5:5). The child is exactly the sort of ‘meek’ Christian who might be viewed as an inheritor of the Earth. Speaker, lamb, and Christ are all linked by their innocence – making ‘The Lamb’, among all of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, one of the most innocent of all.
‘The Lamb’, one of the Songs of Innocence, finds its counterpart in ‘The Tyger’ from Songs of Experience:
In his book Blake’s Contrary States: The ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ as Dramatic Poems, the Blake scholar D. G. Gillham watches that whereas the child-speaker of ‘The Lamb’ is assured in and proud of, his knowledge of the lamb (‘Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee …’), the speaker of ‘The Tyger’ is marked by suspense. Question and inquiry comes at us, and an answer to any of them might be impossible: ‘the speaker can do no more than wonder,’ as Gillham notes.