The connection between Spring and The Ecchoing Green is obviously very close despite the fact that Blake persistently kept the two apart in his issues of the songs. Apparently he used Spring many times as a contrasting poem, for in fifteen issues before 1851 it appears in connection with On Another's Sorrow, The Blossom, The School Boy (before its transference to Experience), The Little Black Boy, Holy Thursday, and The Chimney Sweeper; after 1851 it follows Night. In none of these poems does springtime play a major role except as a contrasting element. But Spring is more than merely an element in the contrast between happiness and sorrow, despite its apparent insouciance. Its more serious purpose is comparable to Blake's implied drama in the second stanza of The Ecchoing Green.
    The anonymous command opening the poem ("Sound the Flute!") may be read simply as the breaking of the dark silence of the long night, the awakening of spring after winter's sleep, the revival of sport on the green after a night in the earthly mother's warm, protective bosom. In any case the rest of the stanza Blake devotes to a favorite subject, the birds of the air and the "bush," just as the next stanza belongs to the boy and girl, and the third to the lamb and "I." This type of Blakean progression also forms a prominent part of the structure of Night and the Introduction, and it is a good example of the way in which various symbols contribute to the formation of the major symbol, as well as of the process I have called shifting identity. In Spring, the birds welcoming in the new year are the same birds that sing in The Ecchoing Green, that laugh in Laughing Song, that sport in the sky in The Blossom. But they are also, specifically, a nightingale and a lark, a bird of the bush and a bird of the air, a bird of night and a bird of the day. Blake thus establishes a dichotomy while at the same time maintaining the essential unity of the opposites in their identical response to the flute. Both birds sing, both delight, both welcome in the year. The joy of heralding spring is thus universalized so that the idea of renascence, as in The Ecchoing Green, can be applied equally well to divinity, humanity, and the animal world.
    In the second stanza the dichotomy is translated into human terms, the boy and girl, a technique used also in The Ecchoing Green, Nurse's Song, and The Blossom. Both boy and girl echo the welcome of stanza 1 with what Blake now calls infant noise, something undoubtedly like "the sweet chorus of Ha, Ha, He" in Laughing Song. There is nothing articulate as yet except insofar as joy is inherent in a wordless cry of ecstasy. Infancy in all its innocence and animality is another way to welcome in the new year, to celebrate the awakening not merely of spring but of the human body (and soul), to commemorate the birth of the infant joy into the long day of sport on the green. The last stanza then goes beyond the simple, obvious comparison to unify the whole poem by resolving the two dominant images or "sets of characters," and synthesizing the diverse particulars which make up the universal welcome.
    Though the last stanza begins on the same note as stanza 2, Blake introduces two new characters, the lamb and "I." If the comparison already in force between the bird and child is expanded to include these lines, the poem revolves itself into something of an epic simile: as the birds delight and the boy and girl "crow" with infant noise, so we, the lamb and I, welcome in the year. Yet the "I" is not identified, except possibly as Blake himself, the lamb's appearance is unprepared for, and the mode of welcome in the last stanza differs greatly from those of the first two stanzas. This latter difference is due to the dichotomy already established between nightingale and lark, boy and girl: the first pair "delight," the second "crow" with "Merry voice." And capitalizing on the awakening of the body and soul in stanza 2 and the existence in the poem of male and female, the unmistakable tactile quality of the third stanza particularizes the random joy of the first two stanzas in the idea that "we" love to welcome in the year, love in the very limited sense applicable to ignorant, instinctive innocence. The tumult of the first two stanzas has now ceased, and in its place Blake evokes the sensuality of tongue on white neck, the softness of white wool, and the physical excitement of a kiss. In other words renascence is essentially a physical phenomenon in innocence. After having heard the herald and joined their infant sounds to the paean, the children become articulate in the awakening of physical desire. It is not necessary to read Freud into the lines but merely to recognize, as Blake did, that children's sport is physical as well as selfish. "Thoughtless" is Blake's word. Just as the song of a bird and the cry of a child is expended energy unrestrained, so the expression of bodily contact is diving energy in another form, the "sensual enjoyment" that must be "improv'd" before regeneration is possible. Blake's choice of the nightingale in the first stanza is therefore most apt: the male sings during the breeding season, the "energetic" season as one might say. The entire last stanza concerns action, not contemplation, gratified desire not rationality.
    The use of the first person, finally, shows Blake at his subtle best, in the reunification of what he has broken in two. "I" is at once the voice of both birds and both children, the latter now articulate; and the voice can only be one, the Piper's. In fact the entire structure of Spring is similar to that of the Introduction: the aimless piping in the latter parallels the bird's song in Spring; the piping of a song about a specific subject parallels the human voice of stanza 2; the addition of words to the Piper's music replaces the pipe parallels the entire last stanza of Spring; and finally, the union of inspiration, poet, Piper, and lamb also parallels the last stanza here. The parallels are inexact, of course, but the similarity goes even further. The command of stanza 1 in Spring is fundamentally the same as that delivered by the child on a cloud to the Piper; and Spring as a whole can be considered as the song about a lamb. This is precisely why Blake introduced the lamb into the poem at all. Where else could he have turned for a more appropriate symbol of rejuvenation and renascence than to the Lamb of God? Reawakening, then, is spiritual as well as physical. For Blake the two were identical, an improvement in sensual enjoyment being synonymous with regeneration.

--from Robert F. Gleckner's The Piper and the Bard. See citation below.
 

At first glance, "Spring," seems quite remote from hymnody:
 
                Sound the Flute!
                Now it's mute.
                Birds delight
                Day and Night;
                Nightingale
                In the dale,
                Lark in sky,
                Merrily,
                Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.

But leave aside the refrain (which ecchoes Shakespeare's "Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,/Under the blossom that hangs on the bough"), and one eighteenth-century hymn, at any rate, is remarkably close--in more, once again, than metre only. It is by John Newton, and its first stanza is printed below in eight lines instead of the usual four:

                                            Kindly spring
                                            Again is here,
                                            Trees and fields
                                            In bloom appear;
                                            Hark! the birds
                                            In artless ways
                                            Warble their
                                            Creator's praise.

If we append Blake's refrain to this, we could slip the whole nine lines (though I am far from claiming the result as an embellishment) into Blake's poem.

--from John Holloway's Blake: The Lyrical Poetry. See citation below.
 

Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1963.
 

Bass, Eben. "Songs of Innocence and of Experience: The Thrust of Design." Blake's
Visionary Forms Dramatic. Ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1970. 196-213.
 

Bentley, G. E., Rev. ed. Blake Books. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1977. 394-395.
 

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

Chayes, Irene H. "Little Girls Lost: Problems of a Romantic Archetype."
Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Northrop Frye. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice, 1966. 65-78.
 

Frosch, Thomas. "The Borderline of Innocence and Experience." Approaches
to Teaching Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed. Robert F.
Gleckner and Mark L. Greenberg. New York: Modern Language Association,
1989. 74-79.
 

Gardner, Stanley. Blake's 'Innocence' and 'Experience' Retraced. London: Athlone
Press, 1986.
 

Gillham, D. G. Blake's Contrary States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1966.
 

Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and the Bard. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1959.
 

Gleckner, Robert F. "The Strange Odyssey of Blake's 'The Voice of the
Ancient Bard.'" William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed.
Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 101-21.
 

Gleckner, Robert F., and Mark L. Greenberg, eds. Approaches to Teaching
Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Modern Language
Association, 1989.
 

Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983.
 

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1964.
 

Holloway, John. Blake: The Lyrical Poetry. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd, 1968.
 

Keynes, Geoffrey. "'Blake's Own' Copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience."
The Book Collector 29 (1980): 20-21.
 

Langland, Elizabeth. "Blake's Feminist Revision of Literary Tradition in 'The
Sick Rose.'" Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Ed. Dan Miller, Mark
Bracher and Donald Ault. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. 225-43.
 

Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. London: Routledge, 1981.
 

Lincoln, A[ndrew] W. J., ed. William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of
Experience. Blake's Illuminated Books, vol. 2. London: Tate Gallery
Publications, for the William Blake Trust, 1991.
 

Lindsay, David W. Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. London:
Humanities Press International, 1989.
 

Phillips, Michael. "William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience from
Manuscript Draft to Illuminated Book." The Book Collector 28 (1979): 17-59.
 

Pinto, Vivian de Sola. "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: Gollancz, 1957. 66-87.
 

Simpson, David. Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry. Totowa: Rowman, 1979.
 

Summerfield, Geoffrey. Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth
Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.
 

Wicksteed, Joseph H. Blake's Innocence and Experience. London: Dent, 1928.

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