William Blake Study Questions (adapted from a guide by Al Drake)
Songs of Innocence, General Questions:
1. What do you consider to be the task or purpose of Songs of Innocence? In other words, do the songs teach us anything? If so, what?
2. How is the title phrase "songs of innocence" capable of more than one interpretation?
3. Are adult limitations in understanding different in kind from a child's limitations? What bounds the perceptions of an adult? What bounds the perceptions of a child?
"Introduction"
4. What is the child's role in relation to the piper? What does the child want the piper to do?
5. Might the line "I stain'd the water clear" be read in two different ways? If so, how?
"The Lamb"
6. How are the child-speaker, the lamb, and Christ "the Lamb" set in relation to one another? Why is it so easy for the child to identify the lamb's creator, and so easy to invoke God's blessing on the lamb?
"The Chimney Sweeper"
7. Why does the child-speaker interpret his situation - practically a form of industrial-age slavery - in a positive light? Does the content of his narration undercut his innocent trust in God?
8. What is the child-speaker's relationship to little Tom Dacre? What does Tom's dream mean?
"Holy Thursday"
The footnote which says Holy Thursday was the Ascension Day is actually wrong - the people who organized this event carefully avoided clashes with other major holidays. So if it's just a regular Thursday, what makes it special, or “Holy”?
What religious feast does the reference to “mighty wind” recall? (You might think in this context about John 14:18 - while King James Bible renders it as “I will not leave you comfortless”, other versions available in these times often translated it as “I will not leave you fatherless” [Geneva Bible] or simply “I will not leave you orphans” [Wesley's New Testament])
10. How does the speaker describe the movements of the children? Is this description ambivalent, and is the poem as a whole less innocent-sounding than some of the others? If so, why? What lines or phrases might lead us to that conclusion?
Songs of Experience
"Introduction"
11. What is the difference between the "piper" of the introduction to Songs of Innocence and the "Bard" in Songs of Experience?
12. How do you interpret the symbolism of the introduction - its references to "Earth," light and darkness, and the "starry floor / watry shore"?
"Holy Thursday"
13. How has the speaker's perspective changed from the corresponding poem in Songs of Innocence? What allows the speaker to see things differently?
14. What is the "trembling cry"?
15. How do you understand the poem's references to natural things - sun, rain, fields, thorns, etc.?
"The Tyger"
16. What emotional progression does the poem imply in the speaker's contemplation of the Tyger?
17. What is the answer to the question in line 20, "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Why does the speaker need to ask the question? Who is "he," i.e. the lamb's creator?
18. What is the significance of the poem's references to "fire," "burning," and the "furnace"? What does fire often symbolize?
"The Chimney Sweeper"
19. Compare the poem to its Innocence precursor. Again, what enables the child to interpret his situation so differently?
20. Is it significant that the child uses the present tense in the last stanza - "because I am happy, & dance and sing…"? What is the nature of his dancing and singing?
21. What is the logic of the child's statement that his parents, their conception of God, and that God's Priest and King "make up a heaven of our misery"? How can they all "make up" a heaven from the existence of misery?
“And did those feet…”
The first half of the poem is a series of questions regarding an old legend. What is it that makes this legend so amazing to the poet?
What are “dark Satanic mills”?
What kind of fight does the poet promise to have and what does he hope to achieve?