Infant Joy and Infant Sorrow

Infant Joy is from the Songs of Innocence and Infant Sorrow is from the Songs of Experience by William Blake.

Here, we have an unusual speaker because the speaker is 2 days old. He has not been named yet because he was just born. That is why the title is infant joy. A really short poem, with simple syntax, and simple diction. It is just like the mother and the baby are talking or the mother is just imagining. The infant has no name here. The infant is not named and normally the infant cannot speak. It is like an imaginary dialogue. The mood is positive because the speaker is referring to joy, like the title.

Does this poem sound like a lullaby? YES. Just like The Lamb, it is about biblical joy, Christ, and innocence. In the bible, there are references to the joy of Christ. Again, it has a childish language. The words are repeated. The last line in both stanzas is repeated or “two days old” is repeated in both stanzas. There is question and answer structure; “What shall I call thee/ Joy is my name.” 

“In ‘Infant Sorrow’, instead of openness to sky, we find enclosed space, a claustrophobic bedroom containing yet further enclosed space- the curtained bed of conception/birth heavily draped in sickly green.” (Simpson 24). Simpson refers to the difference between Infant Sorrow and Infant Joy, according to him Infant Sorrow is a monologue spoken by the child, but Infant Joy is a dialogue. This is the biggest difference between the two poems. In Infant Sorrow, the speaker is lamenting. Simpson finds a reason for this; he says this is about dynamism; dynamic refers to the energy to produce something new, here in this context, because Infant Joy is a dialogue and because it is from Songs of Innocence, we can say it is dynamic. Songs of Innocence includes dynamic poems because we always have “active communication” and we have it in Infant Joy. In the Songs of Experiences, there is no active communication, no dialogue. There is just a speaker who is in a way despondent. The child speaker in the Infant Sorrow is despondent. The critic talks about “enclosed space”, this is a good point because we have a despondent speaker and, a lack of hope. According to Calvin, human beings are innately evil, and sinful. So, the innocence of childhood is distorted by birth because the child causes pain to his parents. In the first lines; My mother groand! my father wept. Here, he causes suffering for his parents.