"A Cradle Song"S. Foster Damon's 1947 reading of "A Cradle Song" indicates that most early critics accepted Isaac Watts' Hush! my dear, lie still and slumber as the model for Blake's poem. However, Damon claims that "There is no more resemblance [between the two works]than there must be between any two cradle-songs. He also claims that the designs of the second plate have a "Raphaelesque hardness, which is in this day not pleasant."
Vivian de Sola Pinto acknowledges the connections between "A Cradle Song" and Watts' work made by Damon and others but notes that no critic has yet explored the relationship between Blake's and Watts' work in detail, a task she takes on in her 1957 study. Placing Watts' "A Cradle Hymn" side-by-side with Blake's "A Cradle Song," de Sola Pinto analyzes their thematic and prosodic similarities and differences, ultimately reading Blake's song as the "delogicalization" of Watts' hymn.
In his 1959 reading of "A Cradle Song," Robert F. Gleckner asserts that it is an expression of Blake's concept of moving into the realm of higher innocence citing as evidence that after 1815, Blake always followed "A Cradle Song" with "The Divine Image" in the sequence of Songs of Innocence. Gleckner discusses the movement from "pleasant dreams" and "sweet smiles" to "moans" and "weeping" as the movement from innocence into experience and ultimate innocence, "the hope of mankind" which is "the ultimate negation of self." Gleckner claims that this "song" is actually a "prayer," the same prayer mentioned in "The Divine Image." Hazard Adams' 1963 reading asserts that the poem is both a song and a "prayer for the continued innocence of the child." Adams classifies the poem as one of Blake's lullabies which Adams claims are the most complicated of the Songs of Innocence "because [of] the speaker's attempt to join the natural and supernatural--two concepts which to the child have never been apart."
Harold Bloom (1963) briefly addresses "A Cradle Song" (which he categorizes as a "song") suggesting that the baby's cries are "a lament for all mortality, for the transience of innocence." (Bloom's 1987 treatment of "A Cradle Song" reiterates this assertion.)
In his 1964 reading, E.D. Hirsch argues that the poem is a prayer, citing the imperative verb forms of the first three stanzas as evidence. Hirsch also claims that "A Cradle Song" is "the clearest instance of the way the Songs of Innocence sanctify the sorrow, love, and joy of ordinary life--not by making the human figures into anagogical symbols but by showing them to be the thing itself, the human divine."
In 1965, Alicia Ostriker again addresses the relationship of "A Cradle Song" to the work of Isaac Watts claiming that Blake consciously appropriated and modified the eighteenth-century form of "morally oriented children's literature."
D.G. Gillham's 1966 substantial treatment of "A Cradle Song" compares it to its "experienced" counterpart of the same title found in the Rossetti Manuscript in an exploration of the difference between innocent and experienced love. Gillham notes that, as in other pairs of poems, Blake uses the same words ("sweet," "soft", "peace", "weep", and "beguile") in each poem to create radically different meanings . He also points out that while the experienced mother commands and projects herself and her identity onto her child, the innocent mother blesses and merely looks on her child with (somewhat distanced) awe. Gillham compares the complete peace of the relationship between the innocent mother and her child to the peace that "accompanies and succeeds the sexual act," a moment of sympathy in which "privacies become secondary to a uniting experience" overcoming, briefly, the individuals involved.
In contrast, Geoffrey Keynes' 1967 reading of "A Cradle Song" claims that the simplistic lullaby "calls for little comment." Keynes does, however, suggest that the infant's halo formed by the pillow in the second illustration is worth noting.
Once again addressing Watts' influence on Blake, John Holloway (1968) briefly discusses the differences in "A Cradle Hymn" and "A Cradle Song" and asserts that Blake's poems should be read as invitations to initiate a debate between the ideas suggested by Watts and by Blake.
Eben Bass (1970) offers an explication of illustrations accompanying "A Cradle Song" in which the ambiguous enclosure of vegetation in the first plate and the cradle in the second plate can be interpreted as both protective and oppressive. He also points out that the illustrations of "A Cradle Song" are the reverse images of those of "Infant Sorrow."
In his 1973 treatment of the poem, which he considers to be Blake's "most successful poetic depiction of innocent sympathy," D.G. Gillham again discusses "A Cradle Song" in conjunction with its experienced counterpart found in the Rossetti Manuscript. In an analysis of the speakers' language, Gillham points out that the statements of the innocent mother are "much more tentative" than those of the dogmatic, experienced mother. Gillham also discusses in great detail the sexual dynamics of the relationship between the experienced mother and her child.
In 1981, Zachary Leader argues that the mother will not accept that the tears of the child are the lament of Christ "for all mortality, for the transience of Innocence," (an idea posited by Harold Bloom in 1963), and as a result, experience is inevitable. Leader addresses the foreshadowing of this experience, "the vague premonitions of threat and danger," both in the text and in the illustrations of the poem. Leader interprets the vegetation of the illustrations as oppressive. Leader also acknowledges the subtle shifts in mood of the mother's voice, as well as her abrupt return to "vision," as troubling elements suggesting the fragility and fleeting nature of adult vision.
Heather Glen (1983) also addresses the mother's curious shifts in mood as reflected in the ambiguous syntax of the poem. Glen also briefly discusses Blake's writing of the poem against Watts' hymn and offers a brief psychoanalytic reading of the mother's interaction with her child as a process of "constructing a world" quite different than the world of the panic-stricken speakers in An Island in the Moon.
In his 1986 analysis of the illustrations of "A Cradle Song," Stanley Gardner similarly interprets the mother's interaction with her child as a positive construction, "an assertion of faith" similar to that of the Virgin Mary in the Nativity. Gardner cites as evidence the illustrations, claiming that the movement between the first and second plates is a reflection of the text's movement "from a lullaby to a statement of faith."
David W. Lindsay's 1989 reading addresses the discrepancy between Gardner's and Leader's interpretations of the illustrations and suggests that neither can be interpreted as "an appropriate visual correlative for the conceptual and tonal unity of the mother's song."
--Lydia Whitt (December 1995)
Works Cited
Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle: U Washington P, 1963.
Bass, Eben. "Songs of Innocence and Experience: The Thrust of Design." Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant. Princeton: UP, 1979.
Bloom, Harold. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1963.
Bloom, Harold, Ed. William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. New York: Peter Smith, 1947.
De Sola Pinto, Vivian. "William Blake, Isaac Watts, and Mrs. Barbauld." The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto. London: V. Gollancz, 1957. 67-87.
Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. London: Athlone, 1986.
Gillham, D.G.Blake's Contrary States: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience as Dramatic Poems. Cambridge: UP, 1966.
Gillham, D.G.William Blake. Cambridge: UP, 1973.
Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959.
Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: UP, 1983.
Hirsch, E.D. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to William Blake. Chicago: UP, 1964.
Holloway, John. Blake: The Lyric Poet. London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1968.
Keynes, Geoffrey. Commentary. Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. By William Blake. 1789,1794. New York: Orion, 1967.
Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Lindsay, David W. Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, Int., 1989.
Ostriker, Alicia. Vision and Verse in William Blake. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1965.