Blake was thirty years of age when he began to write the "Songs of Innocence." This is an astounding fact, for the "Song of Innocence" expresses for the first time in English literature the spontaneous happiness of childhood.Now nothing in the whole world of emotion is of lighter texture than the happiness of a child.Like the dew, it vanishes with the first rays of the sun, and its essential quality, spontaneity, is a thing never to be recalled.Blake recaptures the child mind.He does not merely write about childish happiness; he becomes the happy child.He does not speak of, or for, the child; he lets the child speak its own delight and, what is most marvelous, there are no false tones in his voice.Blake is universal; he expresses the natural delight in the life of every happy child in the world.The cry of his "Little Boy Lost" is the cry of every child at the first discovery of loneliness.We will analyze some of his famous poems to highlight his attitude to child.In the "Songs of Innocence", Blake enters an Eden to which man had long been alien.The very opening poem describes a vision.The poet here sees a child on a cloud.After some talking, laughing and weeping with joy, the child vanishes from the poet's sight.Now this child may be the child Christ, speaking from heaven.Or, the child may be an angel as a representative of innocence.Or.This child may be the allegorical spirit of pastoral poetry.The child in these poem lamb speaks to the lamb, as if the lamb was another child and could respond to what is being said.The child shows his deep joy in the company of the lamb who is just like him, meek and mild.The poem conveys the very spirit of childhood the purity, the innocence, the tenderness of childhood and the affection that a child feels for little creatures.A religious note is introduced in the poem because of the image of Christ as a child.The living conditions of the chimney sweeps were very miserable.Although some masters took reasonably good care of their sweeps, most kept them worse than animals.Sweeps arose literally "in the dark" and worded until noon.They returned to their lodgings, they carried heavy bags of soot, and they slept not on mattresses or even straw but on those very bags of soot.When the sweeper in this poem says "in soot I sleep", he is not talking metaphorically.Soot is his element of day and night.The child and the lamb are symbols for Christ too, and Christ represents purity or innocence, the second characteristic of this world.In the poem called The Lamb, the identification between the child and the lamb, and of both with Christ, is complete.Addressing the lamb, the speaker, says that Christ Himself is a child as well as a lamb.The world of the "Songs of Innocence" is largely a child's world.It is a world of simplicity, purity, happiness, and security, though touches of the adult world of misery and guilt do occasionally intrude here.The central situation in this world is that of a child or young animal delighting in life.Fear is not necessarily totally absent from this world, but when danger threatens, a parent figure is at hand to console and to comfort.In Holy Thursday, we get a picture of little children sitting "with radiance all their own" and raising of Heaven the voice of song, or "like harmonious thundering the seats of Heaven among." The Chimney Sweeper contains a vision of an angel who, with his bright key, opens the coffins and sets all the blackened chimney sweepers free, letting them go to a river and wash themselves clean.When Tom wakes up after seeing this vision, he feels happy and warm, and he is made to realize the need of everybody's performing his duty. "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.".
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