POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE91William Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” are among the best-
known animal poems in the language and foreground identification of
and with species, as their titles announce. The speaker of “The Lamb” is
of course a young child who directly addresses a lamb. The child knows
the identity of the lamb before the moment of encounter the poem
records, since he (Blake’s accompanying illustration shows the child as
a boy) has already learned its name and a few of its key features: that it
feeds “by the stream and o’er the mead” and has “softest clothing, wooly,
bright; /... a tender voice / Making all the vales rejoice.”^16 The poem
reveals not just the child’s ability to learn the name of a kind of animal
but also the pleasure that accompanies doing so, shown in his repeti-
tions of “lamb” as the creature’s name. The speaker also uses species
characteristics to answer fundamental questions about his relation to
the lamb; that is, about boundaries between species. Identification in the
poem means not simply recognizing the kind of animal but that it is also
a child (a lamb), made by God, and like the human child of God meek,
mild, and innocent. The child’s understanding of the lamb’s being is
informed both by immediate perceptions and cultural learning, but it
is focused on similarity, most evident in his assumption that the lamb
will understand his words. Part of the power of the poem is that adult
readers or listeners will think of the child’s words as filled with error,
that he has made literal a theological metaphor, even as he explores and
reveals some of the profound grounds of that metaphor, the cultural
repetitions of the name of the lamb that the speaker dwells on—namely,
lamb as animal, child, Christ, sacrifice, and food. This is a poem that
reveals how central the idea of species is to cultural knowledge. Of
course, the poem also works to undermine species essentialism, since
the boundaries of the name and its definitive components are fluid. There
is also a neat blurring of voices in the poem, lamb and child both bleat-
ing sounds of innocence, kinds of cant or babble. These are the sounds
of a child, the poem suggests, beyond rationality and full awareness,
making the vales rejoice as the sheep’s cries do.
“The Tyger” is also the utterance of a speaker dwelling on the meaning
of a particular species. Significantly, this recognition is through an
encounter not with the physical animal but with a textual representation