Critical discussion of "Laughing Song" is rare. Up until the 1980s, most critics brushed the poem off as a flighty, not terribly interesting exercise. For example, the earliest reference to the poem does not contain any analysis, only showing it alongside an earlier version. G.L. Keynes's 1910 note "William Blake's 'Laughing Song': A New Version" includes a copy of "Song 2nd by a Young Shepherd" (found written on a fly-leaf of Blake's Poetical Sketches) followed by "Laughing Song." Keynes does not discuss the significance of the differences between the two poems.

Perhaps initiating the dismissal of the poem as a fanciful undertaking, Joseph Wicksteed understands "the dimpling stream, the green woods, the air and the hills, the meadows and the grasshopper and the 'painted' birds [of 'Laughing Song' to] all join in to swell our own sweet chorus of laughter" (88). Hazard Adams may attempt a more subtle reading of the poem, but "Laughing Song's" interest for him lies in its placement between "Spring" and "The Lamb" (these latter poems, Adams claims, are both about Jesus). Although the children of "Laughing Song" might appear to be the origin of laughter, it is actually centered everywhere and its circumference is nowhere (229). Thus, the green hill laughing is "a massive personification which makes personification more than an isolated device" (229). Adams concludes that this "principle of animation culminates in the identification of Jesus with everything" (229). Jesus, I hasten to add, is absent from the poem.

E.D. Hirsch opens his discussion by noting Blake's transference of the poem from Innocence to Experience and back again. Yet instead of analyzing this movement, Hirsch claims "Laughing Song" is just "a pastoral poem about children and joy....Essentially the poem is a combination of traditional pastoral and traditional children's poetry, with the key element of religious vision left out" (189). Hirsch understands the speaker of the poem to be Blake himself, and the poem to belong "to the end of Blake's literary apprenticeship rather than to his poetical majority" (189). Martin Price furthers critical disparagement of the poem: "The landscape of Innocence is a fostering, humanized landscape. It echoes human songs and laughter....The 'Laughing Song' is one of the simplest of the Songs" (41). D.G. Gilham's analysis of the poem is similarly superficial, although his understanding of it as an alternative to "The Little Vagabond" is provocative: the "Laughing Song" speaker "lets himself go, and, because he gives himself up, all nature seems to join in with his mirth....There is no desperate mood of longing here, such as the vagabond shows, but an easy, self-forgetful chiming in of youthful vigour with the heady intoxication of spring" (202).

Thomas Dilworth's article "Blake's Argument with Newberry in 'Laughing Song'" was the first pointed discussion of the poem. Dilworth reads "Laughing Song" as an antithesis to John Newberry's "How to Laugh," a lyric which appeared in his A Pretty Book for Children (1761). Blake and Newberry share the same subject and use the same laughing sound: Ha, Ha, He. Yet Blake's lyric lacks expressions of pain and humanizes Nature's various aspects instead of personifying her as a whole: "Joyful innocence is here shared equally by man and by nature in its broad diversity and particularity" (36).

Myra Glazer returns to the critical dismissal of the poem in her article, "Blake's Little Black Boys: On the Dynamics of Blake's Composite Art." Glazer focuses on how "The Little Black Boy" changes meaning depending on the poems that surround it. "The Little Black Boy" preceded by "Laughing Song" differs from "The Little Black Boy" preceded by "The Lamb." According to Glazer, "Laughing Song" is "a frothy celebration of a joyously animated song....[which] depicts, and brings about, by visual image and word, shared joy, and we become the invisible guests in the collective scene on the plate" (225). Yet in his subtle examination of the engraving, Zachary Leader reads the design of "Laughing Song" as a deliberate recalling of "the attenuated pastoralism of [Thomas] Stothard's designs (engraved by Blake in 1783) for Joseph Riston's A Select Collection of English Songs" (52). Blake alters his pastoral figure with an "unfashionably simple costume [and a] sturdy, muscular body [which] are [not] in the least like anything Stothard might have produced" (53). The poem is similarly derivative of eighteenth-century pastoral, though Blake adapts the literary tradition as well: for example, he re- names "Edessa and Lyca and Emilie" "Mary and Susan and Emily" (52).

Also focusing on the illustration, Stanley Gardner understands the differences between the engraving and the poem as a way into "Laughing Song": none of the people in the illustration "is young enough to be described in the terms of the poem, and none is behaving in a manner recognizable as 'innocent' in those terms" (50). The "painted birds" are the verbal hint of "an adult, or at least adolescent, occasion" (50). Gardner concludes his analysis somewhat vaguely with the assessment that the poem conveys "the shaping influence of Innocence on polite social intercourse" (50). Building on Leader's and Gardner's insights, Norma Greco's reading of "Laughing Song" takes issue with earlier critics' cavalier dismissal of the poem. "Laughing Song," Greco contends, is not only "an intriguing display of the hermeneutics of Blake's visual-verbal discourse, but also a provocative and important comment on the limitations of innocence and artistic creation in a fallen world" (69). The word "painted," in particular, "directs us to Blake's composite art: the verbally 'painted birds' and the equally 'painted' birds of the illustration," underscoring the connection between the speaker of the poem and the man of the engraving (70-71). The painted birds and the children "are bound by the same conditions of temporality" (70-71). Thus, "Laughing Song" is about the "necessary compromise of art with the material world....[which] recalls to us our own vulnerability to the same materiality" (72).

Katherine Montwieler (December 1995)

Bibliography

Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963.

Dilworth, Thomas. "Blake's Argument with Newberry in 'Laughing Song.'" Blake Newsletter. 14 (1980): 36-37.

Gardner, Stanley. Blake's "Innocence" and "Experience" Retraced. London: The Athlone Press, 1986.

Gilham, D.G.. Blake's Contrary States: The 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience' as Dramatic Poems. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1966.

Glazr, Myra. "Blake's Little Black Boys: On the Dynamics of Blake's Composite Art." Colby Library Quarterly. XVI (1980): 220-236.

Greco, Norma A. "Blake's 'Laughing Song': A Reading." Concerning Poetry. 19 (1986): 67-72.

Hirsch, E.D.. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Keynes, G.L.. "William Blake's 'Laughing Song': A New Version." Notes and Queries. 11 (1910): 241-242.

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

Price, Martin. "Blake: Vision and Satire." In William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 39- 51.

Wicksteed, Joseph H.. Blake's Innocence and Experience: A Study of the Songs and Manuscripts. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1928.