An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

The earliest thorough reading of "Infant Joy" appears in Joseph Wicksteed's seminal Blake's Innocence and Experience: A Study Of The Songs And Manuscripts "Shewing The Two Contrary States Of The Human Soul" (1927). Largely on the basis of the poem's illustration, Wicksteed concludes that "Infant Joy" evokes a child's innocence not merely at birth, but at conception itself. In the etching, the flower inside which the mother cradles her child is equated by Wicksteed with the womb. It frames what he calls "the rapt moment of holy generation or conception." The angel figure in the scene signifies for him both the father's "life factor" and God's agent in a ceremony of "Annunciation" heralding the child's conception to the mother in a manner mirroring the announcement made to the Virgin Mary regarding Christ's birth in the Bible. Wicksteed also assumes, seemingly arbitrarily, that the respondent to the infant in the first verse is his or her father, and in the secon d verse, his or her mother.

Wicksteed's interpretation remains a touchstone for critics who read "Infant Joy" unambiguously. David Lindsay, for example, echoes Wicksteed in the passing mention of the poem in his Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experie nce. He stresses the interaction between its text and illustration, grouping it, along with "The Blossom" and "Spring," among the Songs of Innocence, "whose texts are in isolation so cryptic as to seem almost meaningless." His emphasis on the poem' s etching leads him to agree with Wicksteed that the work celebrates, "the harmony of parents and child at the moment of conception." Like Wicksteed and Lindsay, Walter Minot accepts "Infant Joy" essentially at face value. His "Blak e's 'Infant Joy': An Explanation of Age" posits a "simpler" reading than majority of critics, reading interpreting the poem "literally" and eschewing speculation about irony or sub-textuality. He sees the piece as primarily a glorification not of concep tion, but of a newborn's pre-baptismal innocence, the period before indoctrination into institutionalized religion when, he argues, Blake believed children were free from spiritual self-consciousness.

Geoffrey Keynes commentary on "Infant Joy" in his facsimile edition The Complete Writings of William Blake (1957) seconds Wicksteed's emphasis on its etching. "The apparent simplicity of this delicate poem and the obvi ous beauty of the illustration have deceived some critics into taking it at its face value," he notes. Though the text, considered alone, seems self-explanatory, he argues that, "the illustration reveals the true nature of the verses." Keyne's interpret ation of the piece's etching is consistent with Wicksteed's, appraising the flower as a "womb" framing a scene of "annunciation" and conception. Anthony Blunt's The Art Of William Blake (1959) further characterizes the interplay between "Infant Joy" 's verse and illustration noted by Wicksteed and Keynes, deeming it "the perfect fusion of text and decoration." B lunt asserts that the text and illustration are so complimentary of each other that neither can be fully explicated separately. He adds that together they constitute, "a type of illuminated page for which no parallel can be found except in the finest man uscripts of the later Middle Ages." Blunt is especially interested in the plant imagery in Blake's etchings. He bases a pairing of "Infant Joy" with "The Sick Rose" from on the aesthetic opposition between the flowers depicted in each piece's illustrati on, rather than between their texts.

E. D. Hirsch's reading of "Infant Joy" in his Innocence and Experience: An Introduction To Blake (1964, 1975) sets the tone for more recent criticism, complicating the relatively superficial analyses of Wicksteed and K eynes with considerations of the poem's sub-textuality and ambiguous voice. Hirsch declares that "Infant Joy" evokes, "the primary demands of Songs of Innocence - adult sympathy for the child." He views the poem's dialogue as taking place withi n a deeply empathetic lullaby a mother is singing to her newborn child. By assuming both their voices, her lyric celebrates the child's present innocence and joy ("I happy am"), and obliquely mourns the eventual initiation into experience that will mitig ate it ("Sweet joy befall thee"). Hirsch interprets the flower in the piece's etching as a birth emblem and the angel as signifying divine grace.

D. G. Gillham concurs with Hirsch's recognition of the mother's voice in "Infant Joy" in his Blake's Contrary States: The 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience As Dramatic Poems (1966). He argues that the mother imag ines a dialogue with her child not to pacify him or her, but instead to reassure herself of the baby's happiness. "...She goes so far as to put words into its mouth," Gillham declares, "making up the child's realization that it lacks a name, and then pr etending that it gives itself a name which is a projection of the mother's pleasure: 'I happy am,' / 'Joy is my name.' "

Zachary Leader's Reading Blake's Songs (1981) also recognizes the mother's voice in "Infant Joy," though he reads its tone differently. Leader, too, sees the full text of "Infant Joy" as a lullaby sung by the mother t o her child, but not so much to celebrate its innocence, as to ward off encroaching experience. He sees her song's sweetness as undercut by a sub-current of dread for the loss of innocence that awaits the child. He argues that her tone vacillates betwee n optimistic celebration of innocence in the lines mimicking the child's voice and pessimistic recognition of its inevitable loss in the lines sung in her own voice. Leader extends this interpretation to the piece's design, in which he notes the flower w hich encloses and protects the mother and child, but which also signifies sexual maturation and therefore experience, and threatens to swallow them. He compares the angel in the illustration to previous depictions of the Greek god Psyche by Blake and Fus eli. He sees the angel as a personification of the intellectual self-consciousness which characterizes experience and waits to separate the child from his or her mother.

In his Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced (1986), Stanley Gardner fleshes out Hirsch's suggestion of "Infant Joy"'s sentimentality. He situates the poem in its contemporary context social context of high infant mortality and therefore reads it as bittersweet and "astringent." He rejects an interpretation of the poem as reassuring or idyllic. He argues instead that it is morally provocative demanding an emotional recognition of the infant that Blake's contempo rary readers perhaps found difficult to extend to small children since they were so likely to die prematurely. Gardner calls this spiritual acknowledgement caritas, and he sees the second speaker's gift of it to the child ("Sweet joy befall thee") as a k ind of baptism. He assumes that since the infant is not yet three days old, he or she has not yet been baptized into institutional Christianity. He further speculates that since the second speaker asks the child's name, rather than naming the child him or herself, the child is an orphan, a conclusion which intensifies the piece's poignance.

John Holloway's discussion of "Infant Joy" in his Blake: The Lyric Poetry (1968) extends Hirsch's by playing with the lyric's ambiguity about voice. he suggests that the refrain, "Sweet joy befall thee," for example may be read as the infant's expression of the blessing his or her birth grants the mother, as the mother's "confirmation" to the child that life will bring happiness, or as Blake's meta-commentary on both. He also briefly relates the poem's metre to the hymn tradition, deciding that it mimics the standard common metre.

Edward Larrissey's William Blake (1985) picks up from Holloway, noting the influence of Anna Lititia Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). Larrissey relates "Infant Joy" to the eighteenth century convention of didactic Christian songs for children. He attributes the entire text to a voice other than the infant's, someone who wishes to indoctrinate him or her into some spiritual consciousness by "putting words into the mouth of a child." This spe aker, he continues, wishes to name the child, and to lend speech to its inarticulacy: in each case fixing the indefinite with words: possibly a suspect activity."

Heather Glen offers a more positive view of parent-child dialogue in her Vision And Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1983). Her reading of "Infant Joy" centers on the child's acquisition o f a "name," a symbolic definition by which it is "born" into language. She discusses the issue in terms of opposed notions she designates as "naming" and "calling." "Naming," for Glen, is a process by which entities or objects are fixed in language by e xternal forces which impose "names" on them, often arbitrarily. "Calling," however, is an interactive dynamic through which an entity or object "names" itself by answering the "call" of an external stimulus in a manner which constitutes self-definition. "Calling" then must be based upon what Glen describes as "reverence for and recognition of the other." She reads "Infant Joy," as well as the other songs as plays on the eighteenth century convention of didactic religious songs for children. While thes e songs, such as those by the Methodist Charles Wesley, sought to "name" children by spiritual indoctrination, Blake's, Glen suggests, strive to "call" out their inner selves through spiritual enfranchisement. When the parent in the poem asks the child, "What shall I call thee?", how shall I recognize you, the child, allowed to define his or her own self through its own expression, replies, innocently, "Sweet Joy."

Harriet Guest and John Barrel's "Who Ever Perished Being Innocent?" (1988) finds "Infant Joy"'s voice essentially indeterminable, though they do conclude that it cannot be credited to an actual child or read as a figurative ex pression of a child's feelings. They argue that language acquisition represents a "fall" into experience which the text facilitates by granting a desire for language to the child which "seems tanatamount to already being fallen." They note that, parado xically, the abstract cognition a child would use to verbally express its own pre-linguistic innocence presupposes experience. No reading of the song, they claim, "can avoid the suggestion that to attribute the power of speech to a two-day old 'infant' is either to desire the massacre of its innocence or to acknowledge 'innocence' as an adult fantasy which must be hurriedly dispatched, however much it is also valued and its destruction regretted."

"Infant Joy"'s elusiveness has also allowed it to be read in contexts seemingly tangential to Blake scholarship. Elizabeth O'Higgins' "Blake's Joy Of The Yew" (1926) examines the lyric from the unlikely angle of Irish nation alism, offering a surprisingly exhaustive argument that Blake composed "Infant Joy" among other pieces in Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Irish/Gaelic and that his work is generally informed by a supposed Irish identity. With scant elaboration, Camille Paglia deems "Infant Joy" emblematic of primal and intrinsic sado-masochism in Sexual Personae (1990), a controversial study of psychosexuality in western literature. She inexplicably views the poem as "a parodistic critique of Rousseauism," of Gardner's caritas, a claim that, "every gesture of love is an assertion of power," that "there is no selflessness of self-sacrifice, only refinements of domination." London Records issued Ten Blake Songs For Voice and Pi ano (1958), a recording of musical settings for "Infant Joy" and other Blake songs by the great British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams.

--John Murphy (November 1995)

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.

Lindsay, David W.Blake: Songs Of Innocence And Experience. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989.

Blunt, Anthony. The Art of William Blake. New York: Columbia UP, 1959.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr.Innocence and Experience: An Introduction To Blake. 2nd. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.

Gillham, D. G.Blake's Contrary States: The Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience As Dramatic Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.

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.

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

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

Glen, Heather. Vision And Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Guest, Harriet. and John Barrell. "Who Ever Perished Being Innocent?" Style Vol. 22, No.2 Summer 1988: 253 - 256.

O'Higgins, Elizabeth. "Blake's Joy of The Yew." Times Literary Supplement. Vol. 31, No.1 January - March, 1956.

Paglia, Camille.Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence form Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1990.

Vaughn Williams, Ralph.Ten Blake Songs For Voice And Piano. London. 1958.