Infant Joy - Analysis

Naming a self into the world

The poem’s central claim is that identity, at birth, is both given and discovered at the same time. The infant begins with a startling blankness: I have no name; and is defined only by immediacy—but two days old. Yet almost instantly, that emptiness fills with feeling rather than facts. When the adult voice asks, What shall I call thee? the baby answers not with a family name or a description, but with an emotion made into a name: Joy is my name. Blake suggests that for the newborn, to be is to feel; the poem treats happiness not as a mood that happens to the child, but as the child’s first, purest form of personhood.

Two speakers, one shared tenderness

Blake builds intimacy by letting the poem move between voices: the infant’s brief declarations inside quotation marks and the caretaker’s blessing outside them. The adult’s language—Sweet joy and Pretty joy!—is almost like cooing, the kind of speech that circles around a baby rather than explaining anything. That circling matters: by repeating Sweet joy befall thee! the speaker tries to make joy not just a name but a fate, something that can be wished into permanence. The tone is openly celebratory, even devotional, as if the infant were a small miracle whose mere smile becomes proof that the world can be good.

The tension: is joy the child’s truth, or the adult’s desire?

Under the sweetness is a quiet contradiction. The baby says I happy am with absolute certainty, but the poem also shows how quickly the adult takes over the act of naming: Sweet Joy I call thee. The child’s original namelessness—I have no name—makes room for the caretaker’s projection. Even the line Thou dost smile, / I sing the while; pairs the baby’s small, silent expression with the adult’s louder response, suggesting that the infant’s feeling is being interpreted and amplified. Joy may be genuine, but it is also being curated—wrapped in blessings and repetition until it becomes a fragile ideal the speaker must keep invoking.

A blessing that sounds like a wish against loss

The poem’s gentle turn comes when the initial question of naming becomes a repeated charm: Sweet joy befall thee! returns like a protective spell. If joy were secure, the speaker wouldn’t need to say it twice, and then again. Blake lets the reader hear, beneath the lullaby tone, a parent’s fear that what is perfect at two days old may not stay perfect. The poem ends as it began—with joy asserted—yet the insistence itself hints that joy, in the world the child has entered, is something that must be called, sung, and continually re-wished.