Spring

Spring
By William Blake

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.

Little boy,
Full of joy;
Little girl,
Sweet and small;
Cock does crow,
So do you;
Merry voice,
Infant noise;
Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.

Little lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft wool;
Let me kiss
Your soft face;
Merrily, merrily we welcome in the year.

About the Poem

In the poem, “Spring,” the poet introduces a vivid picture of spring’s beauty clamped with springtime activities. The speaker happens to be a little child. The sound of flute welcomes the spring season and so does the other merry sounds after the long silence of winter. The child bids to play the flute and Nature seem to embrace the child’s request. The Nightingale and Skylark welcomes the spring followed by other birds and crow.

Blake spoke of the Skylark, the Nightingale, the little boy, the little girl, the lamb and the crow. The first five characters in the poem perfectly portray the theme of innocence, but this is not so with the crow. We don’t usually consider a crow to be an angel of innocence.  The second stanza is actually an illustration of the happiness. Both the little boy and the little girl are happy. All are happy and merrily welcomes the season of spring. The third stanza stands as a unified joyful welcome. By introducing the character of the lamb and creating a bond with the child, the poet actually wishes to welcome the Spring universally.

Blake’s last lines again to understand the implied meaning. Notice the last line, “Merrily, merrily, we welcome in the year.” He replaces the word “to” with “we” in the third iteration of the line above. Blake does it in the best way, uniting the little boy with the lamb, for a purpose. Mark, he has devoted 8 lines out of 27 to create the bond between the lamb and the little boy. Is it only to welcome the Spring (or the New Year) together or something deeper?

Spring’ may be thought as a rendering for the children. The expressions are akin to lullabies yet the poem possesses inner significance. The very anonymous opening lines “Sound the flute…” signifies the breaking of the dark silence of the night and marks the onset of the Spring after the deep Winter slumber.

The poet dedicates the entire third paragraph to the lamb, considered as the highest symbolization of Innocence. The child (the narrator of the poem) says, “Let me kiss your soft face;” makes the reader think of the inner implications of the lines. William Blake closely attenuates his thought of innocence with age! To Blake, everything is young and playful. He seems to be parallel with Mark Twain’s idea of aging – “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

About the Poet

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his “prophetic works” were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language.” While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God,” or “human existence itself.”