NURSE'S SONG

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Songs of Innocence

Plate 24

The second of the three Songs of Innocence poems which Blake wrote for Island in the Moon is Nurse's Song. The first two lines are spoken by an observer. The Nurse reveals her own emotional state in the next six lines. She is content to do her duty rather than participating in the singing and laughter of the children. Although the Nurse is satisfied within herself, in the next verse she expresses apprehension for the children. However the children want to extend their joyful, carefree play. The Nurse relents, realizing that the light in which the children bask will soon fade and that they may sleep when the light is gone.

Innocence, Blake realizes, is a temporary state. Children grow up and are exposed to the demands of living. The nurse plays the role of the protective element in the Nurse's Song but she has not been given the knowledge or understanding to guide the children along the perilous path. The careless activity of the children playing on the green is contrasted with the Nurse's concern about fading night. We see the cyclical rhythm of night and day, play and sleep, childhood and maturity. 

It is not clear from the poem if the children are well provided for by families or if they are under the care of institutions for the poor as are the children in Holy Thursday. We wonder if the laughter and play are part of an innocent childhood or if they are a respite for children who have already been exposed to hunger, cruelty and harsh conditions such as Dickens and Bronte described and Blake wrote about in The Chimney Sweeper.

On Page 38 of Blake's Apocalypse Harold Bloom states:

"For Blake 'Innocence' is from the start an equivocal term.
...
So, by 1789, when he engraved the Songs of Innocence, Blake seems to have anticipated joining them together with songs that would show 'The Contrary State of the Human Soul,' as he did five years later. Innocence is a state that warms our hearts against and reproaches the errors of a supposed mature existence."

Songs of innocence, SONGS 24, (E 15)
"Nurse's Song          

When the voices of children are heard on the green       
And laughing is heard on the hill,                             
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down    
And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies

No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep                                       
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly                          
And the hills are all coverd with sheep

Well well go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh'd  
And all the hills ecchoed"