Comparative Commentary between Nurse’s Song and Nurse’s Song

This is a comparative commentary between two poems, written in a bit more than an hour and without a speciific word limit. It focuses on the tone, as opposed to the many metaphors.

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William Blake, an 18th-century poet, has published two poems named Nurse’s Song. They were, however, published in two distinct collections — Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience — five years apart.

The two poems are similar in many aspects, although their meanings are different. First, they are constructed in a similar manner from a number of stanzas, each containing four lines and with the second line rhyming on the last one. The number of stanzas differs, though — four in the former, the song of Innocence, yet only two in the latter, the one of Experience.

Second, the narrator of both poems is the same; she is an old nurse shouting to her children, who are playing on a field. Except for the titles, this can be seen throughout the whole poems since they consist of a single monologue talking to its children — see line five in both poems, “come home, my children”. However, the tones of the voices are highly contrasting. In the former poem, not one single word with negative connotations is used. Instead, the vocabulary brings the thoughts to the happiness and innocence of childhood, such as in line 2: “laughing is heard on the hill” and line 11: “in the sky the little birds fly”.

The corresponding poem in Songs of Experience effectively creates a directly opposite atmosphere despite its short length. Line 4 contains the almost exclusively negative words “green and pale”, and the last line, 8, mentions “winter and night in disguise” — the “bad” counterparts of summer and day, made more sinister through disguise.

In both poems, the tone is identical to the mood of the narrating nurse. Analysing the poems’ storylines, it is obvious that both describe a nurse calling her children home at dusk: “come home, my children, the sun is gone down” at line 5 in both poems. In the former poem, the nurse is calmed down by the children’s games, reminding her of good memories from her own youth: “My heart is at rest within my breast, and everything else is still” on lines 3–4. As opposed to this, the nurse of the latter poem is disturbed by the children. She recalls memories, too, although they make her bitter of jealousy: “The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, my face turns green and pale”. The nurse of Innocence lets the children keep playing when they request to do so on the basis that the sun is still up (“let us play, for it is yet day” on line 9, and “go and play till the light fades away”, line 13) while the nurse of Experience never allows the children to oppose her judgement. Instead, she condemns their game as useless: “Your spring and your day are wasted in play” at line 7.

Except for this difference, the poems are very similar: the first line in the first stanzas and the two first lines in the second stanzas are identical. This leaves only five unique lines in the Nurse’s Song from Songs of Experience, although they are used very well to show the difference between the two nurses’ personalities: “whisperings are in the dale” instead of “laughing is heard on the hill” on line 2. In this manner, more sentences are substituted with others having the same meaning but different connotations.

Other poems in Songs of Innocence are The Lamb, Laughing Song and Infant Joy — positive titles, just like the word innocence. In the same way, the other poems in Songs of Experience are negative and describe the sad parts of life. Examples of poems therein are The Sick Rose, Infant Sorrow and A Poison Tree, following the same naming convention.

My interpretation of these two poems is that Blake attempts to show the two different personalities that a person can evolve into. The nurses are on the surface the very same person, since their origin is the same, but their souls are widely different; the nurse who narrates the poem of Innocence is just that — innocent and happy, still carrying the spirit of her childhood within herself. Diagonally opposite, the nurse of Experience has let bad experiences cloud her mind and made her bitter.

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