Spring - Analysis

A hymn of innocence that keeps restarting itself

Blake’s Spring reads like a small ritual for summoning joy: the speaker keeps calling the season into being through sound, naming, and touch. The repeated refrain Merrily, merrily doesn’t just describe happiness; it tries to manufacture it, as if the year needs welcoming in again and again. That insistence gives the poem its bright tone—cheerful, singing, almost childlike—while also hinting that this innocence is something you must actively hold in place.

The flute: sound that suddenly vanishes

The poem opens with a command—Sound the flute!—and then immediately snaps to its opposite: Now it’s mute! That tiny contradiction creates a flicker of tension under the celebration. Spring begins in music, but the music is fragile, liable to disappear. Nature quickly answers the silence: Bird’s delight arrives Day and night, with the Nightingale in the dale and the Lark in sky. The effect is a world eager to sing even when human breath (the flute) fails—spring’s chorus is bigger than any one performer.

Children as the season’s “merry voice”

The second stanza shifts from birds to people, but it keeps the same logic: spring is measured by sound. The Little boy is Full of joy, the Little girl is Sweet and small, and their noises are praised as a kind of music—Merry voice, Infant noise. Even the barnyard joins in: Cock does crow, / So do you, putting children and animals on one level, all participating in a shared, uncomplicated chorus. The speaker’s delight feels genuine, yet it also frames the children as emblems—miniature proofs that the world is still new.

The lamb: intimacy, possession, and gentleness

The final stanza makes spring tactile. The lamb speaks—Little lamb, / Here I am—and the child (or speaker) answers with a string of intimate requests: lick my white neck, let me pull your soft wool, let me kiss your soft face. The tone stays tender, but there’s a mild strain in the verbs: affection comes with handling, even a hint of possession. The poem wants perfect harmlessness, yet it can’t avoid the fact that love often expresses itself by touching and taking hold. Spring, in this view, is not only beauty at a distance; it is closeness that risks being a little too close.

A joy that has to be rehearsed

What makes the poem linger is how its cheerfulness is also a kind of work. The refrain’s job is to keep the scene buoyant, to keep welcoming in the year—as if the year might not come in on its own. Between the flute that goes mute and the child’s hands in the lamb’s wool, Blake lets a faint truth show through the singing: innocence is real, but it is also something performed, protected, and briefly held.