Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the varying perspectives of the speakers within "Songs of Innocence and Experience", and their integral role in conveying the relationship between childhood and adulthood. Through this, it also examines Blake's underlying critique of society, industry, revolution and injustice.

From the Paper:

'New children's literature was designed to attract adults, to protect an image of those virtues which parents wished to calculate in their offspring, as well as to beguile the child' (Glen: 10). This association allows Blake to play on the stereotype of the 'good, innocent child', in order to question the adult perception of what childhood, in reality, means. On the surface, The Lamb does present all that is idyllically innocent, and concerns a child's interaction with the pastoral representation of God - the lamb."

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