The Lamb

The poem’s idyllic, rural setting (“By the stream & o’er the mead,” Line 4) immediately invokes the genre of the pastoral poem, a traditional literary mode that dates back to ancient Greece and is defined by romanticized depictions of countryside life. Pastoral poetry often harks back to an idealized age when humans lived in harmony with nature. Blake draws upon these conventions to create a bucolic stage for his speaker’s sermon on the nature of innocence—the poem’s primary theme.

The interrogative refrain of the opening lines (“Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee,” Lines 1-2) highlights the didactic purpose of the poem: instructing the lamb on who its creator is. The repetition of these questions recalls the instructional mode of catechism, a set of Christian teachings in question-and-answer format, while also evoking the playful form of a riddle or a nursery rhyme. The mingling of didactic and playful tones acquires special significance when we learn that the speaker of the poem is a child (“I a child,” Line 17) and the addressee is a nonhuman creature, the lamb.