CRADLE SONG
William Blake
SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS
“Cradle Song” is typical of the poems from “innocence”. It describes a world of Comfort, love and protection. It is a lullaby. A mother sings it when she finds her child sleeping in the Cradle. The pem is full of motherly love and warmth. In the beginning of the poem the mother speaks about three things. They are “Sweet dreams”, “sweet sleep’ and “sweet smiles”. The mother wants the sweet dreams to form a shield over the child’s head. She wants sweet sleep to stay close to the child like an angel and to weave a crown on he brows of the child. She wants the sweet smiles to be with the child in his sleep. The chid is very happy.
However, in the next lines the tone of the poem changes. The child is shown as moaning and sighing. Though the child is very happy the mother of the child weeps now. Her weeping is due to her thinking about the future of the child. The mother thinks about tne future and weeps. She knows that when her the child grows up he will enter into the world of experience and problems and difficulties. Thus, he will have some unhappy days.
The next stanzas compare the child with Jesus Christ. Once Christ was also a child. He also wept like other children. But there was a difference in the crying of a simple child and Christ. Jesus Christ wept over the sighing and sufferings of all mankind. The mother wants her child to be blessed like Christ. Thus the poem has a religious significance in the concluding lines.
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STRUCTURE OF THE POEM
The poem has eight stanzas, each stanza is composed of four lines. The Rhyming sequence of the poem is AABB. Blake uses this to link key words and ideas together, for the first stanza the use of the Rhyming couplets “shade” with “head” and “stream” with “beams” is reminded of a dreamy, pastoral atmosphere where the child is isolated from the evils of the world. The expression Blake chooses for the poem has a romantic quality to it. With the words like “sweet”, “lovely”, and “moony” display a tranquil, romantic readiness which is spread through the poem.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, it can be said that the narrator expresses her joy on sleep and innocence. The narrator watches his baby sleeping. He is also reminded of the divine. She is reminded that once God also became a human child and wept for mankind. Various images of Chris are brought before us. Christ is shown as a child laying in the cradle, a weeping child. He is also shown as a child smiling on the mankind. His smiles will bring peace to the world.