In little Tom Dacre, Harold Bloom sees "the Lamb, called by Christ's name, who became a little child, only to have his clothing of delight shorn by the exploiter of Experience" (Bloom, pp. 6-7). This is "spilt religion," in T. E. Hulme's famous dismissive phrase, at its most exalted. Like Isaac bound by Abraham on the hilltop ("Father, behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"), Tom's "innocence" blinds him to the totalizing religious and moral structures that shape his predicament. The narrator's sacrifice--his shearing and induction--has already taken place; from the infantile "weep" he's moved into a world of commonality as little Tom's comforter, or properly into the rôle of socializing agent: "Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare, / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." The desacralized rite becomes a nursery of English virtues: forbearance and quietude.
Though the resonances of the sacrificial lamb--"who cried when his head / That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd"--prefigure the New Dispensation, the poem offers only a poignantly insufficient redemption in the dream to come.