An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

Joseph Wicksteed was the first to treat "The Blossom" at length, in his Blake's Innocence and Experience (1927). He finds it, "the supreme passage song between the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul," innocence and experience. Wicksteed places the "fall" from the former phase into the latter between the song's two stanzas. "The merry sparrow ... symbolizes Innocence," he observes, "and the sobbing robin ... symbolizes Experience rather than grief." Wicksteed judges "The Blossom" 's isolated text "without much meaning," but admits that it attains symbolic resonance when informed by its illustration. The etching, he argues, provides a metaphorical context to read the poem in. He declares that the fiery or vegetative pillar in the illustration is "a poetic and symbolic rendering of the phallus prone and erect" which establishes the sexual context many critics have read the piece in. The sparrow and robin then are "the male element as seen by the maiden." The former is "merry" with anticipation, while the former "sobs" with the joy of consummation. The "swift arrow" and "cradle narrow," Wicksteed adds, are likewise to be seen as "poetic symbols of the male and female organs." The text and illustration, taken together, "suggest a bodily and spiritual union, complete and secure, of the passive and the active element of love, the maid and the man."

E. D. Hirsch arrives at no easy explication of "The Blossom," which he deems, "the most difficult poem in the Songs of Innocence." "The difficulty of the poem," he explains, "is not that it is elliptic and compressed, for that is true of all the songs, but that it does not point very clearly to a literal context. Hirsch seems puzzled by "The Blossom" in his Innocence and Experience: An Introduction To Blake (1964, 1975), which rejects Wicksteed's reading of the poem in terms of sexuality in favor of two rather non-commital alternatives. He suggests that the piece may contrast non-sentient life, represented by the blossom, with sentient life, represented by the sparrow and robin. The "unconscious" blossom is "mutely happy and unchanging," while the sparrow and robin, conscious and therefore closer to human existence, vacillate between emotional poles, joy ("Merry Merry...") and sadness ("sobbing, sobbing"). He also offers an interpretation in which the blossom represents "birth" and acts as the pivot between corporeal and spiritual life. The sparrow is the pre-corporeal soul, joyful in its freedom from earthly sadness, while the robin is that soul after birth, trapped in material and burdened by limitation.

D. G. Gillham's Blake's Contrary States (1966) concurs with Wicksteed's "sexual" reading of "The Blossom. Though "The Blossom" is schematically a song of innocence, Gillham's analysis of it focuses on sexual initiation as a mode of experience. He claims that the acquisition of carnal knowledge brings either, "sublimity or disappointment, with no intermediate condition." For self-evident reasons he views the former outcome more favorably, and so complains that, " 'The Blossom' does not bring out the sublime in sexual experience as successfully as other Songs of Experience...." He attributes "The Blossom" to the voice of a young girl, whose apparent equation of the penis with a sparrow/robin he finds frivolous . "The blossom, herself, despite her tenderness," he concludes, "is rather disengaged, and tends to be aware of the male sexual organ almost as a sort of pet."

Edward Larrissey's Reading Blake's Songs (1985) treats "The Blossom" briefly, noting, but not specifying sexual connotations to the blossom, the arrow, the "cradle narrow," the bosom, and sobbing. He sees Blake's inclusion of this intensely sexual poem in the volume as an acknowledgement of the immanence of sexuality, even if unself-conscious and unrecognized, in seeming innocence. Larrissey agrees with Gillham that "The Blossom" is as much a song of experience as of innocence. "The fact that such a song as "The Blossom can appear in Innocence," he observes, "reminds us that the whole series of songs is straining at the limits of the state which supposedly defines them."

John Holloway scornfully eschews any sexually-oriented interpretation of "The Blossom," asserting that such readings, "turn a good poem into a bad one," and taking particular offense with Gillham's discussion. His Blake: The Lyric Poetry (1968) argues that the piece's position beside "The Lamb" in many copies of Songs of Innocence makes any sexual connotation in it unlikely. He posits a reading which avoids "sophisticating" the poem by searching for sub-textuality. Holloway sees the robin, as well as the sparrow, as happy, noting that in Blake's time "sobbing" did not necessarily connote sadness, but instead signified any expressive non-verbal or musical expression. The birds are "near" or in harmony with a literal blossom as well as the figurative one of a girl's "bosom," which Holloway suggests the actual blossom may be pinned to. The poem, then, simply celebrates, "the beauty and gaiety of the season of blossom and growth."

In "Blake's 'Blossom' " (1978), Rodney and Mary Baine also reject a "sexual" interpretation of the poem, favoring a reading centered on the traditional symbolic connotations of the sparrow and robin and specifically faulting Hirsch's and Holloway's inability to develop an alternative to the sexual reading. They read the text as a message from a mother to her child, on the basis of figures in its etching and the presence of the sparrow and robin, who recall attendant birds in many depictions of Mary and the baby Jesus, the most archetypal mother and child. They note that the birds appear to retain their traditional connotations in "The Blossom": the sparrow "carefree" ("Merry, Merry...") and the robin "friendly, and especially sympathetic with suffering" ("sobbing, sobbing..."). They note the appearance of such characterizations in Shakespeare (Cymbeline IV. ii. 224-229), folk balladry, and children's stories by Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Trimmer, and others. They outline the robin's particular association with Christianity, expressed in Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida II. i. 770, V. ii. 230-231 and As You Like It II. iii. 43-44), among other sources. The mother attempts to instill a sense of compassion in her child by invoking birds traditionally associated with suffering and pity. The Baines conclude that "The Blossom" 's implicit theme is identical to the more explicit one of another song of innocence, "On Another's Sorrow": "the universal need for sympathy."

David Lake's discussion of "The Blossom" focuses wholly on its supposed sexual sub-text, though it employs a method analogous to the Baine's toward this opposite end, noting the traditional and contemporary sexual associations of the sparrow and robin. His "Blake's 'Blossom' " (1987) notes the long-standing use of birds' names as slang terms for "penis." He observes that the figure of the sparrow had well-established sexual connotations when the poem was composed. He speculates that Blake may have appropriated a sexual context for the robin, which did not generally have erotic connotations, from a bawdy song placed as contemporary to Blake's composition of "The Blossom" and within his milieu by its appearance in the autobiography of London radical Francis Place, who worked near the print shop where Blake was employed. Like earlier advocates of a "sexual" reading, Lake sees the sparrow and robin as phallic, and the blossom's "cradle narrow" as vaginal. He concurs with Wicksteed that the sparrow is "merry" with anticipation of intercourse and the robin "sobs" as it approaches orgasm.

Zachary Leader concentrates his interpretation of "The Blossom" in Reading Blake's Songs (1981) exclusively on the piece's illustration, neglecting the text altogether. He sees the song's etching as signifying the constant attenuation which thwarts innocence and compels all things to yield to experience. "The over-arching flame-plant that extends up to the right side of 'The Blossom', " he argues "is Blake's attempt to envisage the energy instinct in all vegetation, and by extension in all material reality - to give form to the life-force Yeats saw in the chestnut tree of 'Among School Children,'....." Leader agrees with King-Hele and others that Blake equates the eighteenth century concept of "vegetable fire" with the forces behind human maturation. He sees the seven figures in the illustration, who seemed to be compelled to motion by the flowing plant that frames the text, as representing successive phases of the human life cycle, when "read," significantly, clockwise.

Stanley Gardner finds no need to track supposed allusions in "The Blossom." He argues instead, in his Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced (1986), that the lyric "exists as a symbol complete in itself." "The poem's meaning comes through symbolic actions, not symbolic identities," he notes. "The poem is one tenuous indivisible semantic loop, a symbolic statement of nurture realized in nature, polarized between laughter and desolation." Gardner sees "The Blossom" juxtaposing "joy" (the sparrow) and "sorrow" (the robin) so that one is "temporarily prevented from discriminating between the two concepts." The etching, he continues, "releases the enigma" of the text by establishing a spiritual context to read it in. "The illustration disperses the unity of the poem through religious affirmations," he observes, "and faith becomes a component of Innocence." Gardner concludes that "The Blossom"'s illustration qualifies its text as "a recognition of caritas," or compassion, "humanity's divine nature."

Wicksteed, Joseph. Blake's Innocence And Experience: A Study Of The Songs And Manuscripts "Shewing The Two Contrary States Of The human Soul. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr.Innocence and Experience: An Introduction To Blake. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.

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

Larrissey, Edward. William Blake. Oxford: Basil Bunting, 1985.

Holloway, John. Blake: The Lyric Poetry. London: Edward Arnold, 1968.

Baine, Mary R. and Rodney M. Baine. "Blake's 'Blossom.' " Colby Library Quarterly. Vol. 14. No. 8. March 1978.

Lake, David J. "Blake's 'The Blossom.' " The Explicator. Winter 1987: 20 - 23.

Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.