Reading a Blake Lyric

The idea

Blake's lyrics look simple and are not, so read them in four steps. First, place the poem: Innocence or Experience, because the same title can mean opposite things in the two books. Second, identify the speaker, often a child or a bard, and ask what the speaker does not understand that the reader does; the innocent sweep's comforting moral, "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm," is ironic because duty has delivered him to misery. Third, read the symbols: the lamb, the tyger, the chartered street and the manacles carry spiritual and social meanings beyond their surface. Fourth, find the pair: compare the poem with its contrary in the other book. Then state what the poem exposes, a church, a state, a parent or a state of mind, and how the speaker's limitation reveals it.