The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others like "The Sick Rose" and "The Divine Image,” make their arguments through symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blake's favourite rhetorical techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns, applying them to his own, often unorthodox conceptions. This combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant with Blake's perpetual interest in reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human thought and social behaviour.
I think ‘The Nurse’s song’ is a good example of Blake conveying his ideas about vulnerability in society. The adopted persona presents ideas of guardians protecting innocent children. The nurse guardian is worried about the children’s safety, showing a psychologically real character like a real parent has trouble defining the line between an overly attentive guardian and one that is not attentive enough.
The scene of the poem features a group of children playing outside in the hills, while their nurse listens to them in contentment. As twilight begins to fall, she gently urges them to "leave off play" and retire to the house for the night. They ask to play on till bedtime, for as long as the light lasts. The nurse yields to their pleas, and the children shout and laugh with joy while the hills echo their gladness. The poem has four quatrains, rhymed ABCB and containing an internal rhyme in the third line of each verse.
This is a poem of affinities and correspondences. There is no suggestion of alienation; either between children and adults or between man and nature, and even the dark certainty of nightfall is tempered by the promise of resuming play in the morning. The theme of the poem is the children's innocent and simple joy. Their happiness persists unabashed and uninhibited, and without shame the children plead for permission to continue in it. The sounds and games of the children harmonize with a busy world of sheep and birds. They think of themselves as part of nature, and cannot bear the thought of abandoning their play while birds and sheep still frolic in the sky and on the hills, for the children share the innocence and unselfconscious spontaneity of these natural creatures. They also approach the world with a cheerful optimism, focusing not on the impending nightfall but on the last drops of daylight that surely can be eked out of the evening.
A similar innocence characterizes the pleasure the adult nurse takes in watching her charges play. Their happiness inspires in her a feeling of peace, and their desire to prolong their own delight is one she readily indulges. She is a kind of angelic, guardian presence who, while standing apart from the children, supports rather than overshadows their innocence. As an adult, she is identified with "everything else" in nature; but while her inner repose does contrast with the children's exuberant delight, the difference does not constitute an antagonism. Rather, her tranquillity resonates with the evening's natural stillness, and both seem to envelop the carefree children in a tender protection.
Another poem I think reflects on the vulnerability of children is ‘The Chimney Sweeper’. William Blake wrote "The Chimney Sweeper" of "Songs of Innocence" in 1789. In the next to last line of the first stanza, the cry "'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" is the child's attempt at saying "Sweep! Sweep!," which was the chimney sweeper's street cry. This poem shows that the children have a very positive outlook on life. They make the best of their lives and do not fear death.
This is quite the opposite in its companion poem in "Songs of Experience" which was written in 1794. In this poem, the child blames his parents for putting him in the position he was in. He is miserable in his situation and he also blames "God & his Priest & King". This point of view is different from that of its companion poem because the chimney sweeper has been influenced by society and has an "experienced" point of view.
As a reader I can make comparisons between Watts and Blake using the Chimney Sweeper, contrasting the voice and persona of a child. In both poem’s, the child speaking appears to accept the cruel unfairness of the life without comment, but the fact that the sweep does so is far more telling because he is a victim, whereas clearly the other children- Watt’s child- is comfortably off. Further more, the child in Watt’s poem merely sees the misfortunes of others as a cause for gratitude to God without any hint that something needs to be done the right of the poor. The reason for this is perhaps hinted in the chimney Sweeper, for the angel promises comfort in the next world as a constellation for the mysteries of this one. Such a constellation would have been thought a real one by Blake’s readers, but it was hardly a justification for the callous cruelty which sweeps retreated. If, therefore, you react with a sense of scandal to the uncomplaining voice of the sweep and the angels lack of concern at his cruel suffering, then he may infer that there is an extra dimension here that is lacking in the Watt’s poem and that Blake’s irony is functioning (in other words there is a disparity between the apparent message of the poem and the true meaning) and that the final viewpoint is Blake’s own of condemnation, not the child’s acceptance.
In The little boy found we see another hopeful sign - the boy is being guided by some kind of "wandering light". It may belong to the father who has left him, or may suggest (in the word "led") a guardian angel or spirit. As the boy cries, God comes to his aid - in white, which suggests his goodness. God is also "like his father", which may mean he looks like the father who earlier deserted the boy, or may suggest the idea that God is the boy's (and everyone's) real father - more so than any earthly parent.
The father, who leaves the boy, is contrasted with the anxious mother who goes in search of him, "pale" with sorrow and weeping (though Blake may mean "weeping" to refer to the "little boy"). God brings the child back to his mother. Attentive readers will see that she has no hope of finding the boy without God's help. Why? Because she has been looking in the wrong place - the "lonely dale" (a valley), while the boy has been in a marsh ("mire") or "fen". (Unless Blake means us to understand that the fen is in the valley - which is possible.)
The poems also appeal to one of our most basic fears - or rather two: our fear, if we are children, of being lost or left behind by our parents and our fear (perhaps even greater), if we are parents, of losing a child.
(This is amplified by real-life reports of abductions and violence to children - and is one of the most profound and terrifying fears we ever face. For many readers, The Little Boy Lost will be far scarier than any conventional horror story or film.)
Blake's narratives, simply as stories, are very naïve and childlike. But they tell of profound and universal experiences or ideas. We worry about children who really get lost - and any young child has fears (perhaps made stronger by parents' warnings) of being lost or separated from mother or father.
The two poems thus form a narrative in two parts - being lost and being found. It also contrasts the way that human parents fail with God's power and love in caring for children. There is a very similar but much more detailed story in Chapter 7 of The Wind in the Willows ("The Piper at the Gates of Dawn") where little Portly the otter is lost but restored to his worried parents with the help of the animals' god, Pan.
Blake does not use metaphors - where something in the poem represents some other thing, usually an abstraction, in a one-to-one way. Rather he uses symbols - and leaves it to the reader to decide what they mean. So we may understand God in the poem as being more or less the same as in Genesis, or, very differently, as the divine element in good people who look after children. And we may see the poem as being about a real child getting lost in a fen, or about the way in which generally, we are unsure about the world and our place in it.
The poems are very short - each has only two stanzas, and the pair together have a mere 16 lines. Although the narrative seems to be stripped down to its essentials, there is room for some suggestive details - so we read that God is "in white", that the "vapour" (mist, presumably) flies away, that a "wandering light" leads the child and that he is lost in a fen, while his mother seeks him in a dale.
With this poet, we can never quite be sure how far these things are intentional and how far they are simply suggested by the need for a rhyme - but it is wiser to suppose that Blake means exactly what he says (or writes) in the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Overall, I think that in exploring ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, ‘The Little Boy Lost’ and ‘A Nurse’s song’ I have explored the idea of children in Blake’s poetry. I think in contrasting songs of Innocence and Experience Blake is trying to show the vast difference in a vulnerable child, the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression.