4.1.8 William Blakes "The Lamb"

Emily Olsen Ms. Orr AP Literature “A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice” (Ferguson 2026). The audience is to speak the words. One type of spoken poem is the Lyric. In lyric form, the audience reads the speaker’s words in a singsong voice. William Blake’s poem, “The Lamb,” reads as a call and response hymn. Blake used voice, sentence structure, and allusion to convey a message of innocence and reverence to God. Blake voiced his words through a child speaker in the poem titled, “The Lamb.” The child is a symbol for innocence and acts as a link between heavenly spirits and the reverence of the lamb in Blake’s poem. In line 17 and 18 of the poem, the child speaker exclaimed to the lamb, “I a child, and thou a lamb/We are called by his name” (Blake 17-18). In these two lines, the child is nearing his/her answer to the question posed at the start of the poem, “Little Lamb, who made thee?/Dost thou know who made thee” (Blake 1-2). The young child explains the lamb’s connection to God, as well as, explains the lamb’s connection to himself; the child shows reverence to the creator, therefore the lamb desires to do the same. The child’s explanation in the second stanza forms the rhetorical poem. Like many childhood sing-a-longs, “The Lamb,” poses a question and precedes to provide an answer. By starting the first stanza with a questioning tone, and the second with a definitive answering tone, Blake convinces the audience of the message of the poem. God and the Christian religion, believe in cleansing and the value of a clear conscience. Black answers the Little Lambs question by saying, “Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!/He is called by thy name,/For he calls himself a Lamb” (Blake 12-14). The Lamb in the second stanza represents Jesus. The simple comparison as the little lamb or child and Jesus, explains the innocence of both