Laughing Song

Literary Commentary

William Blake's "Laughing Song," published in Songs of Innocence in 1789, is a twelve-line lyric in which the entire natural world laughs in concert with three named children. Woods, streams, meadows, grasshoppers, and painted birds all share in a single chorus of joy that builds across three stanzas until the speaker turns to the reader with a direct invitation: come join us.

The poem moves inward, from the broad landscape of the first stanza (green woods, dimpling stream, air, green hill) to smaller creatures in the second (meadows, grasshopper) and finally to three girls, Mary, Susan, and Emily, who sing the refrain "Ha ha he!" The third stanza completes the spiral: birds laugh in the shade, a table is spread with cherries and nuts, and the speaker issues the invitation that the whole poem has been preparing. The grammatical structure reinforces this movement. Ten lines begin with subordinate "When" clauses, piling image upon image in breathless accumulation, before the main clause arrives at line eleven: "Come live, and be merry, and join with me." The delay is the point. By the time the invitation lands, the reader has already been drawn into a world so thoroughly alive with laughter that refusal feels impossible.

Thomas Dilworth, writing in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, has argued that Blake conceived "Laughing Song" as a direct corrective to John Newbery's "How to Laugh," a poem from A Pretty Book for Children (1761) that claims nature produces only three laughing sounds. Blake's response grants laughter to everything: woods, air, hills, insects, birds. Where Newbery confines nature to a few noises, Blake insists on a world in which all created things participate equally in human joy. This principle connects "Laughing Song" to Blake's broader vision of the universe as spiritually animate, a vision explored at greater length in his "Auguries of Innocence," where a grain of sand contains a world and a caged robin troubles Heaven.

Key themes

• Communal joy: shared laughter dissolving the boundary between the human and the natural
• Nature as spiritually animate: not decorative personification but genuine participation in human feeling
• Innocence as unself-conscious belonging: the children do not observe nature but sing with it
• Invitation and inclusion: the poem's structure draws the reader from witness to participant

Notable craft elements

• Repetition of "laugh" and its variants eight times across twelve lines, making the word itself a rhythmic and sonic engine that drives the poem forward
• Mixed anapaestic and iambic tetrameter producing a galloping, song-like rhythm that enacts the laughter it describes
• An inward spiral from landscape (woods, hills) through creatures (grasshopper, birds) to named humans (Mary, Susan, Emily) to the reader, narrowing focus until the invitation becomes personal

Reread prompt

At what point does the poem stop describing laughter and start creating it, and does the grammatical shift from "When" clauses to the imperative "Come" mark that boundary?

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