Criticism of Blake's "The Ecchoing Green" is generally divided into two camps. One group of critics view the poem as one of the most representative of the state of innocence in Blake's Songs. Such critics read "The Ecchoing Green" as Blake's affirmation of a method of social organization in which man exists in both a communal relationship with others and an harmonious, reciprocal relationship with the natural world. To these critics, "The Ecchoing Green" represents Blake's successful attempt to explore a state of innocence which remains untainted by its contrary: the state of experience.

Another group of critics share a radically opposite reading of the poem. While recognizing in the poem the communal and reciprocal harmony representative of the state of innocence, these critics also note Blake positing a foreboding of the coming state of experience. According to such critics, "The Ecchoing Green" acknowledges that the world of innocence is forever threatened by the phenomena of experience: whether sexual awareness, mutability, or mortality.

The following summary will examine, more or less chronologically, the two respective camps. Admittedly, this type of approach runs the risk of becoming reductive: sacrificing a complete annotation of each critic's work for the purposes of achieving narrative coherence. In hopes of avoiding this, I will generally devote one paragraph to each critic, thus preserving the autonomy of each work while still retaining a narrative structure. Accordingly, rather than forcing works that do not directly belong into either camp into one, I will discuss these independently at the conclusion of this summary.

Donald Dike is the first critic to affirm "The Ecchoing Green" as an idyllic description of the state of innocence. Existing in a reciprocal relationship with both the natural world and the members of the rural community, the children's joy evinced in "The Ecchoing Green" is impersonally collective, and thus the poem is one of the few Songs of Innocence which can be read as a pure idyll. Contrary to the expectations of experience, the older members of the community are able to recall their own childhood with a lack of envy.

Examining this vision of communalism found in "The Ecchoing Green" in greater detail, Heather Glen posits a connection between social interaction and imaginative perception. Glen claims that the "sports" described in the poem's first and third stanzas are evidence of communal play which is essential to the creative continuance of the whole community. The old are unenvious of the children's play; they are content that the green is an "ecchoing" place which has heard their laughter before and will hear other laughter in the future. This communal hope affirms the possibility of a mutually created, eternal world of imagination opposed to the finite and temporal world of generation and vegetation.

Glen continues by asserting that the contrasting portraits of the individual's relationship to the larger community in "The Ecchoing Green" and "London" symbolize the contrasting states of imaginative perception in the worlds of innocence and experience. Imaginative perception in the state of innocence is marked by creative acceptance: the recognition of mutuality in diversity as symbolized by the non-threatening acceptance of difference in the rural community. Imaginative perception in the state of experience is marked by division and repetition: an inability to perceive beyond what is sensed as symbolized by the individual's conception of fellow residents as other in London.

Also examining the communalism celebrated in "The Ecchoing Green," Stanley Gardner discovers an historical source for this vision. Gardner suggests that Blake matches his illustrations for the Songs of Innocence to his recollection of the "community of care" he had witnessed in the London of the 1780's--specifically, the children's charity house in Wimbleton (47). The illustrations to "The Ecchoing Green," Gardner argues, are explicit recreations of Wimbleton Common. Thus, both the text and the illustrations affirm what Blake regards as the essential groundbase of innocence: interdependence of community and a natural and social sense of kin.

John Holloway reads "The Ecchoing Green" as the depiction of a "world of harmonious oneness." Noticing both man's communalism and his reciprocal relationship to the natural world, Holloway examines each stanza's contribution to the vision of oneness contained in the poem. In the first stanza, the "Ecchoing Green" both resounds with the sounds of children at play and reflects the happiness spreading throughout the scene. In the second, the old folks witness in the image of the children at play an "echo" of their own youth and contribute their laughter to the echo of childish glee. The third stanza's rhythm recalls that of the first, and thus "ecchoing" becomes one with "darkening."

While Holloway merely suggests the contribution the poem's rhythm makes to its meaning, R.P. Draper more closely examines the correlation between stylistics and the poem's status as a representation of the state of innocence. Because they are not confined by the prevailing modes of expression present in later eighteenth-century verbal art, Draper concludes that the lyric verses are the most truly original embodiment of Blake's imaginative perception. In "The Ecchoing Green," Blake's experimental poetics--his use of complex syntax and matching structural development--enables his vision to remain in the state of innocence, to suggest growth and change while avoiding knowledge which turns this into "the bitter food of experience" (593).

David Lindsay's analysis of "The Ecchoing Green" provides a nice transition between the criticism which views the poem as a representative account of a world of innocence untainted by experience, and that which discovers in the poem a foreboding of the inevitable end of that world. The poem's text, Lindsay asserts, both celebrates communal harmony and resists the fear that might be spawned by the many intimations of time and mutability present in the poem. The latter is achieved by the poem's ability to counteract linear progression with cyclical movement "which associates the rhythms of human life with those of the day" (65). Unlike the text, however, the poem's designs foreshadow the coming movement from innocence to experience. While they endorse the celebration of communal harmony present in the text, the designs "offer hints of the forces that can undermine it" (65).

The conclusion that the designs intimate the inevitable destruction of the world of innocence by experience is shared by Sir Geoffry Keynes and Zachary Leader. Keynes asserts that the second illustrated plate of "The Ecchoing Green" confirms that experience is foreshadowed in this scene of innocence. He suggests that the coiling vines bearing grapes represents the Tree of Life, and the plucking and sharing of this fruit symbolizes passing from the state of innocence to experience through sexual awareness.

After asserting that Blake's Songs of Innocence and Of Experience should be approached as a carefully organized volume of verbal and visual art whose illustrations reveal the larger purpose and unity of the work, Leader too notices how the designs of "The Ecchoing Green" make the poem's subtle anticipation of experience in the region of innocence more explicit. Unlike Keynes, however, Leader argues that the knowledge which will precipitate the passage from innocence to experience is not an awareness of sexual desire, but of transience and mutability.

Unlike Lindsay, Keynes, and Leader, both Alice Ostriker and B.H. Fairchild examine the text itself for evidence of the looming threat of experience. Both critics find such evidence in the poem's metrical composition. After asserting that the poetry of Songs of Innocence and of Experience contains metrical variation and irregularity which contribute to the establishment of precise meanings, Ostriker notes that in the final two lines of "The Ecchoing Green" this stylistic effect reinforces the foreshadowing of experience. Similarly, Fairchild claims that melos (music) functions as one-third of the Songs' artistic whole, and that together with the text and illustrations, the meter helps clarify the meaning of the poetry. The meter of the final stanza of "The Ecchoing Green" reinforces the suggestion that the world of experience is looming over the "darkening Green."

In his introduction to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Harold Bloom posits a third awareness which threatens to destroy the world of innocence. Bloom claims that it is neither sexual awareness, nor the recognition of time's passage, but the recognition of mortality-- suggested by the darkening of the Green--which will end innocence as a state.

Deborah Guth argues that it is both the suggestion of the transient nature of existence and of mortality which, by the poem's conclusion, threatens to end innocence as a state. Guth insists that all of Blake's Songs of Innocence contain a foreboding of the world of experience; thus, the opposition between the states of innocence and experience is almost fully realized in these songs alone. In "The Ecchoing Green," the foreboding of experience occurs in the final narrative shift to a landscape of absence and in the elliptical closure of the poem's final lines, which disavows both the children's faith in tomorrow and the old folk's faith in rejuvenating memory.

While all of the above critics view innocence as either a state to be celebrated or a state whose inevitable loss is to be greeted with a sense of pathos, Robert F. Gleckner argues that the passage from innocence to experience represents merely a necessary step in an individual's evolution toward what Blake considered the desired state of being. The first modern critic to examine "The Ecchoing Green" in the context of Blake's larger poetic vision, Gleckner claims that the poem represents an early enquiry into Blake's emerging conception of the life cycle as a "circle of destiny" involving three stages: innocence, experience, and the higher innocence. "Old John," Gleckner argues, refuses to become a Blakean hero by refusing to advance beyond the state of experience into the body of imaginative creation. Instead, "Old John" seeks to return to innocence vicariously, through the memory of the former "joys" of his "youth-time" which have been excited by observing the sports of the children.

Leaving aside questions about the poem's status on the continuum of innocence-experience, E.D. Hirsch examines the successful fusion of the natural and prophetic landscape in "The Ecchoing Green." Hirsch notes that Blake's "Song" ["I love the jocund dance"] from the Poetical Sketches is the precursor to "The Ecchoing Green." However, while the former poem merely conveys pastoral pleasures, the latter transforms pastoral images into a symbol of the larger cycle of life. Hirsch argues that "The Ecchoing Green" is the most effective fusion of the natural landscape with the prophetic or visionary landscape in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The pastoral landscape is both an occasion for and the content of the prophetic vision, and the poem affirms both that transcendent meaning resides within the natural world, and that eternity resides in the human breast.

David Simpson further examines the fusion of the natural landscape and Blake's larger vision by historically contextualizing the designs to "The Ecchoing Green." Simpson argues that Blake's designs both respond to the contemporary image of rural society and reinterpret the pastoral tradition within which that image exists. He claims that Blake intentionally modifies the image of the tree on the first plate in subsequent editions of the poem in order not to exhaust the image by any specific signification. Through this ambivalence of image, Blake enables the poem to exist as a particular response to an historical situation and yet maintain the wider awareness of his eternal vision.

Michele Stepto examines the Songs of Innocence in an attempt to discover the roots of Blake's Female Will. She notes that "The Ecchoing Green" introduces the hierarchy of human and non-human elements: the human is privileged, while nature, perceived as the Good Mother, assumes a secondary, "ecchoing" status. The poem also introduces the opposition between night/mothering/temporality and daylight/eternity.

MR

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Dike, Donald. "The Difficult Innocence: Blake's Songs and Pastoral." ELH 28 (1961): 353-375.

Draper, R.P. "Blake's Early Poems: Experiments in Romantic Style." Revue des Langues Vivantes. 28 (1966): 587-597.

Fairchild, B.H. Jr. "Melos and Meaning in Blake's Lyric Art." Blake Studies 7 (1975): 125-141.

Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 46-50.

Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and the Bard: a Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne Sate UP, 1959. 83-97.

Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 137-141.

Guth, Deborah. "Innocence Recalled: The Implied Reader in Blake's Songs of Innocence." Colby Library Quarterly. 25.1 (1989): 4-11.

Hirsch, E.D. Innocence and Experience: an Introduction to Blake. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975. 39- 41.

Holloway, John. Blake: the Lyric Poetry. London: Edward Arnold, 1968. 62-63.

Keynes, Sir Geoffry. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion, 1967. 6-7.

Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. Boston: Routledge and Keagan, 1981.

Lindsay, David W. Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989.

Ostriker, Alice. "Metrics: Pattern and Variation." Twentieth Century Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed. Morton D. Paley. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969. 10-29.

Simpson, David. "Blake's Pastoral: a Genesis for 'The Ecchoing Green.'" Blake: an Illustrated Quarterly. 13 (1979): 116-138.

Stepto, Michele L. "Mothers and Fathers in Blake's Songs of Innocence." Yale Review. 67 (1978): 357-370.