Nurses SongFor C. M. Bowra, the "Nurse's Song" in both Innocence and Experience shows how "destructive forces" replace "childlike innocence" when experience intrudes on this innocence. He also associates the freely playing children on the green as emblematic of the "carefree play of the imagination when it is not spoiled by senseless restrictions." In Experience, "imprisoning fear" destroys the liberty of the human spirit.
Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry, identifies Nature as "a kindly old Nurse," and he discusses the protective role of angels in the care of children. Frye explains that Songs of Innocence descends from pastoral convention with its "vision of a simplified rural existence." He also suggests satiric possibilities in pastoral as it "points up the artificiality of the court or city that it leaves behind." These ideas seem to be pertinent when considering the "Nurse's Song" in Innocence as satiric pastoral.
In 1959, Robert Gleckner describes the nurses in "Nurse's Song" and in "The Ecchoing Green" as protective figures. He further explains in The Piper and the Bard that the nurse in Innocence is "a variant of the protective mother of Beulah." The nurse in Innocence protects the children from the terrors of the "night of innocence" which result from children being separated from their parents.
Donald Dike presents some of the difficulties of pastoral in Songs of Innocence in "The Difficult Innocence: Blake's Songs and Pastoral." He suggests that in these poems of Innocence, Blake attempts to cause "man to be different but also more himself; getting him to see his world differently, yet in a way it always partly is" through vision. The "elegiac strain" in Innocence is found in the comforting, assuaging maternal voices that are still "uncomfortably premonitory." Dike's analysis subtly echoes Frye's argument of pastoral's satiric potential by hinting at the less than idyllic comfort in the maternal voices. Dike discusses the nurse's guardian role in the "Nurse's Song" as one that makes safe the children's desired freedom.
E. D. Hirsch argues that innocence "is a spiritual condition which an adult can share" with children. This is found, Hirsch notes, in "Nurse's Song" when the nurse's vision of the night and coming danger is tempered by the children's innocent plea to remain on the green and to continue their play. He further comments that "in celebrating the divinity of human guardianship, the Songs of Innocence celebrate the wisdom of trust, and that wisdom is the final fruit of human guardianship." Hirsch also compares the voice in "The Lamb" with that of the Nurse in "Nurse's Song." He discusses the echoing landscape in "Nurse's Song" along with those in "The Ecchoing Green" and "Laughing Song," which also blend the children's voices with the sounds of the landscape. Hirsch asserts that the "shifts of voice impose shifts of perspective--from the adult world to the children's and then to a 'wise innocence' that embraces both." He seems to address the idea of harmony and community through this comment on perspective. Hirsch suggests that the center of the poem presents a "contrast between adult knowledge and childish ignorance." He claims that both children and nurse give true interpretations of the sunset, but the nurse's acceptance of the children's point of view reveals "her understanding of their divine insight.
D. G. Gillham also gives a comparative reading of the two "Nurse's Songs" in Blake's Contrary States: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience as Dramatic Poems. He discusses the multiple identical and near-identical lines in both poems, and he specifically calls attention to the importance of word choice in each: "The comment on language is implicit: words, no less than human beings, derive their only true life from what they are in association with others." Gillham describes the Nurse in Innocence as "content" and possessing "freedom." She is able to enjoy the present, and is not overburdened by her past. Gillham stresses the way in which the Nurse trusts the children and grants them some freedom of their own. He further observes that "objectivity lies with the innocent nurse," and that while both Nurses in Innocence and Experience are guardians, Blake seems to favor the Nurse in Innocence. She "assumes that man is best left to be guided by his instincts," and thus she admits her confidence in human nature to make the right choices.
John Holloway comments on the "Nurse's Song" in a comparison to poems by Bunyan and Watts: "it seems not unreasonable to take Blake's "Nurse's Song" as a sort of palinode to the sluggard of Bunyan and Watts." Blake contrasts the sluggard of these two other writers who resist sleep through play. Holloway seems to be suggesting that Blake differentiated between play and idleness, and that the former was seen positively and the latter negatively. This point anticipates Glen's exposition on play and children in the eighteenth century.
Hazard Adams, in his analysis of the "Nurse's Song," gives a comparative reading of the poem to its counterpart in Experience, pointing out the different word choices in each (compare "whisperings" and "laughing"), when resembles Gillham's critical approach to the poem. Adams acknowledges that the nurse has "traveled" in experience, but she has not been defeated by it. Adams's reading concludes that the poem ends "in agreement" as the hills echo the children's voices.
Wallace Jackson, in "William Blake in 1789: Unorganized Innocence begins by denying that there is a "method, either dialectical or archetypal, for reading Blake's Songs of Innocence." He names the assumptions necessary for being able to read and understand Blake's poems in ways other than the two he rejects. Wallace also posits that while in Songs of Innocence "innocence is always innocence, . . . not all figures in Innocence are innocent." As with the nurse in the "Nurse's Song," the pitying, protective figure mourns the imminence of experience;" this poem, like others, exemplifies "the inevitable oncoming of experience. . . ." Jackson concludes by listing values that "remain relatively stable within Innocence, one of which is the maternal guardian's goodness despite her possible ineffectiveness (as found in the nurse's failure in the "Nurse's Song" to persuade the children to abandon their play and come inside for the night).
Susan Fox states that "images of females are not merely cultural phenomena but artistic principles, and they have been so little defined that they have clouded full understanding of [Blake's] work." Fox's discussion in "The Female as Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry" treats the differing roles of men and women in the Songs of Innocence as well as in some of the longer, prophetic poems. Songs of Innocence, a prototypical Beulah, portrays the "positive internal powers [as] female": "mothers and nurses protect children from darkness and grief." While female power is positive in Innocence, Fox argues that this power is restricted because the "ultimate power . . . resides in the males outside the borders of pure experience. . . ." This viewpoint contrasts with Dike's earlier assertion that while the female is one locus of comfort (and therefore positive), her voice is still tainted by the expected onset of experience. Jackson added another dimension to considerations of the female realm by previously suggesting the possibility of maternal ineffectiveness juxtaposing her goodness as a guardian.
An explanation concerning Blake's theology with "its vision of the coming Apocalypse, its attack on the moral law, and its valuing on the divine potentia within the human [as] inform[ing] all of [Blake's] writing" backgrounds Heather Glen's discussion of the "Nurse's Song" in "Blake's Criticism of Moral Thinking in Songs of Innocence and of Experience." His Songs express "a sophisticated [understanding] of society's interior and exterior workings," of its failings, and "how they might be transcended." In the "Nurse's Song," this transcendence is evidenced by "unmoralized, unhierarchical, reciprocity and harmony" of the usually authoritative, instructive nurse figure with the children. Again, we have Jackson's perception of the good but ineffective guardian.
A few years after her article, Glen comments more extensively on Blake's Songs in Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Glen argues that although the nurse in "Nurse's Song" is seen instructing the children, an image which "epitomizes the aims of all eighteenth-century children's books," the nurse acquiesces to the children's wishes and does not advise them. She also includes a discussion on the role and significance of landscape in the "Nurse's Song" as revelatory of a "frame of mutual awareness." Youth and age, acceptance and excitement, control and spontaneity blend harmoniously in the poem. Glen gives a detailed exposition on "play" with regards to its place in eighteenth-century society and to the idea that its significance is attained through "confirmation by others." The poem's "focus is less on a particular group or . . . situation than on a mode of interaction." In the "Nurse's Song," according to Glen, the focus is on "interpersonal relationships," on an interaction of "openness and responsiveness," and not on "distortion and domination. . . ."
Zachary Leader places "Nurse's Song" as a slight exception to the other Songs because there is a sense in which the speaker "cannot stop the night from coming" (seeming to indicate the onset of experience) yet "other plates prevent us from taking as 'objective' her attitudes towards it." Leader also reminds the reader that the Nurse is the "creation of an adult piper or poet. His visionary powers withstand the pressures of time and custom, even if hers do not." Leader gives a reading of "Nurse's Song" in which he discusses the Nurse's acquiescence to the children's desire for longer play as well her voice's disturbing tone because she knows that experience will intrude on their lives. Jackson anticipated Leader in this comment about adult and child interaction. Leader comments on the significance of the echo in the poem, and its mixed connotations of community as well as receding interaction. He also highlights the sense of lost vision, in both the physical and imaginative senses, that accompanies the approaching night. However, Leader identifies the Nurse as a positive example of a guardian figure. He discusses the problematic tense shift in the poem that seems to place the poem in the past and not in the present, the positive aspect of the nurse's introspection, and the sense of community between the nurse and the children. Leader concludes his analysis with a landscape study of the poem. He claims that "Like the nurse, we are forced to look beyond the graceful and energetic joy of the children at play" because of the "empty hills" and the constricting "creeper-intwined tree" in the scene.
Harold Bloom, in his introduction, discusses the "Nurse's Song" as a poem whose meaning comes from the "implied time-to-be" when the children's voices will not be heard on the green, and the heart will not "rest in its laughter." Bloom, who has been anticipated by Dike and Jackson, posits "Nurse's Song' as a poem with the "delicate premonitions of the sundered state."
Adopting a more historical perspective for analyzing "The Nurse's Song," Stanley Gardner discusses the origins of the poem from An Island in the Moon as well as the probable inspiration for the song from a time when poor children were sent to be nursed on the greens at Wimbledon. Gardner gives a close reading of "Nurse's Song" in which he investigates the nurse as teacher and care-giver, the simultaneous "ideal" and "familiar" of the poem's "environmental origin," and the moderation of the nurse's authority to the children's sportiveness. He also explains Blake's probable reasons form replacing "meadows" with "hills" in this poem.
In 1986, Norma Greco begins her article, "Mother Figures in Blake's Songs of Innocence and the Female Will" by suggesting Blake's ambivalent presentation of women in his poetry. She posits that the mother figures in Songs of Innocence are precursors to the Female Will in the longer prophetic poems. Greco asserts that these mother figures, while "most apparently loving and protective, their life-denying aspects insidiously emerge in the intricate hemeneutical interplay of text and design." The "Nurse's Song" is not specifically mentioned in this article, but Greco's implications about maternal figures are applicable to this poem.
Robert Gleckner offers a new angle of analysis in "The Strange Odyssey of Blake's 'The Voice of the Ancient Bard'" by commenting on Blake's choice of lettering style in the plate and poem of the "Nurse's Song." Gleckner associates italic script with innocence and Roman script with experience. He suggests that this juxtaposition of italic script in the title with the Roman type in the poem represents the infinite moment "imprisoned in the inevitable temporality and spatiality of text and design." Gleckner also defines the nurse's voice as a prophetic voice, and the poem is one of many other Songs of Innocence that enacts "a state of being."
Harold Pagliaro suggests that the "Nurse's Song" presents "grown-ups sympathetic to innocents who feel unself-consciously at home in the world, but grown-ups who do not unself-consciously share the innocents' vision." He also describes the Nurse in Innocence through a comparison with the Nurse in Experience. The Nurse in Innocence gives a "constructive course of action" and is not controlled by her past as is her counterpart in Experience.
As Dike, Jackson, and Bloom have already argued, Deborah Guth discusses the presence of Experience in Songs of Innocence: "while Innocence is the subject and informing principle of the poems, the constant reminders of Experience make it clear that the prism through which the innocent vision itself is viewed is that of adult experience." A "counterpointing" of voices is found in the "Nurse's Song" in which "harmonious voices conceal a widening gap of awareness." This angle is reminiscent of Glen's focus on the harmonious mingling of opposing entities. Guth reads the poem as one of movement, in which the children are involved in a movement forward, away from the nurse, who remains behind, almost receding into the past.
Expanding Guth's idea of "counterpointing voices" to a dramatic mode, David Lindsay investigates the dramatic presentation of some Songs of Innocence in which "a monologue . . . subsumes a dialogue." No quotation marks are used, and "the primary speaker has achieved complete empathy with the secondary speaker and is thus in a position to undertake both roles." (Think of the nurse and children in the "Nurse's Song.") Lindsay also goes on to cite other critics' reading of the "Nurse's Song," and he compares the two songs in Innocence and Experience.
Joseph Viscomi investigates the "Nurse's Song" in the context of finding evidence for edition printing. He comments that the "Nurse's Song" was printed on "opposite sides of the same leaf [with "Holy Thursday"]; however, the "Nurse's Song" was also paired with "The Lamb," therefore negating a thematic concern in the pairings. Viscomi ultimately asserts that "the evidence for edition printing, though, does not rest solely on copies of Innocence sharing the same plate pairs. He also seems to rule out the idea that a repetition of recto/verso plates in the copies over an eleven years period because it "is simply not credible."
In 1994, Jane Sturrock approaches her study of pastoral in a different way than did Frye and Dike. The central argument of her article, "Protective Pastoral: Innocence and Female Experience in William Blake's Songs and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market" is that only "William Blake inSongs of Innocence and of Experience and later Christina Rossetti in Goblin Market seem to exploit fully the protective implications of pastoral in connection with the early stages of maturation. Moreover, they alone foreground the female in connection with protective pastoral, variously exploring the implications of the historically determined understanding of woman as protected protector." Sturrock "explores the contrast between the use of pastoral in the two works and the way this contrast parallels their different interpretation of the construction of the feminine." The nursery and mother-child relationships are seriously considered in Innocence. She posits that women as care-givers are "images of safekeeping" (as with the nurse in "Nurse's Song"). However, the nurse in this poem is one of many maternal figures that exercises "protection without restraint," an idea that has been presented by Jackson and Glen. Sturrock contrasts the differing female persona in Innocence and Experience. She ultimately argues that a woman's only positive role is "within the world of pastoral, within the state of innocence."
--Beth Ann Neighbors (November 1995)
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