• "Songs is notable not only for a concern with the different ways children and adults see and understand the world (a theme that would occupy Wordsworth, too) but also for its acid critiques of social evils, political injustice, and their agents" (150).

• What is significant about Blake's use of illuminated texts?

156:

• Explain:  "Childhood is a time and a state of protected 'innocence,' but it is a qualified innocence, not immune to the fallen world and its institutions" (156).

• Explain:  "Unlike Milton's narrative of the Fall from Paradise, Blake shows either state of soul possible at any moment" (157).
• Explain:  "Blake, like Mary Wollstonecraft, implicates innocence with dangerous ignorance and vulnerability to oppression" (157).
• Explain:  "Blake's point is not that children are pure and adults fallen, or that children are naive and adults perspicacious.  The contrary possibilities coexist, with different plays and shades of emphais in different poems" (157).

• What is significant about the comparison of Tom's hair with a lamb's wool (6)?
• What is the significance of the black and white imagery used in the poem?

• What does Blake mean by duty in the final line (24)?

• How does the message of this poem compare with that found in that found in the Songs of Innocence version?
• What are "the clothes of death" (7)?
• Explain lines 9-10
• Explain line 12.

• What does Blake mean by "the forests of the night" (2)?
• Explain the imagery used in lines  13-16.
• What is the speaker's answer to the question in line 20?