The Blossom

Literary Commentary

William Blake's "The Blossom" is a twelve-line lyric from Songs of Innocence (1789), built as two matched six-line stanzas that read, on their surface, like a nursery song. A blossom speaks, or a voice speaks from beside one, addressing first a merry sparrow and then a sobbing robin. Both birds come near. The poem sounds simple. It is not. Two centuries of Blake criticism have divided over whether its quiet interior holds a child's pastoral, an erotic allegory, or both at once.

The stanzas are built as mirrors. Lines 2-3 and the closing "Near my bosom" repeat verbatim across both halves. What changes is the bird (sparrow, then robin), the perceptual verb (sees, then hears), and the feeling (merry, then sobbing). Who speaks the refrain — whose body is "my bosom" — the poem never settles. Readers have proposed the blossom itself, a mother with her child, or the young woman that eighteenth-century English called a blossom coming into bloom. All three readings stay available inside the same text.

Joseph Wicksteed, Geoffrey Keynes, D.G. Gillham and Warren Ober read the poem's birds as figures of erotic love, with the sparrow's flight "swift as arrow" toward a "cradle narrow" marked as phallic and the robin's sobbing as the aftertone. E.D. Hirsch and, with qualification, W.H. Stevenson push back, skeptical that Blake would fold such symbolism into a book prepared for children. The poem does not force a choice. Its structural argument, instead, is the shared line: joy and sorrow are kept close to one kept place, audible to one perceiving voice.

Key themes

• Innocence as receptivity — the capacity to see joy and hear grief without yet choosing between them
• Joy and sorrow coexisting within a single perceiving voice
• Overlapping images of flower, womb, and cradle — a cluster rather than a single symbol
• The knowability of other creatures — one bird seen as motion, one heard as sound

Notable craft elements

• Predominantly trochaic cadence with frequent catalexis; the nursery-rhyme rhythm matches the collection's child-speaker frame
• Mirror-architecture: two stanzas share three fixed lines, so change registers against repetition
• Doubled diminutive adjectives ("merry, merry," "pretty, pretty") mark the child-speech register
• Paired perceptual verbs, sees for the sparrow and hears for the robin, shift the poem from visible motion to audible feeling

Reread prompt

On second reading, whose voice closes each stanza — whose is the bosom the birds come near?

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