Nurse’s Song: Two Poems by William Blake

A look at both the poems with this title, one in “Songs of Innocence”, the other in “Songs of Experience”

William Blake (1757–1827) wrote two poems entitled “Nurse’s Song”, and it is important to take both of them into account. Blake produced his “Songs of Innocence and Experience” as a set of etched plates between 1789 and 1794, with the byline “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”. A number of the poems can be directly related, as between the two sets, and some have identical titles. “Nurse’s Song” is one of these titles.

The poem in “Innocence” comprises four stanzas with a standard ABCB rhyme scheme and an internal rhyme in the third line of each of the first three stanzas:

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 everything 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.”