Infant Sorrow: Analysis & Commentary

A baby speaks of its entry into the world, which brought pain to its parents. The world it came into seemed dangerous. It was helpless, vulnerable, noisy, encased in its body like a devil hidden in a cloud.

The baby struggled against the confinement of its father's hands and the swaddling in which it was wrapped. Unsuccessful, it resigned itself to sulking on its mother's breast.

Commentary

For Blake, a fiend was not to be regarded as evil – it was an embodiment of energy and instinct. So here, the baby comes into the world not as a peaceful, meek being, but as one filled with positive energy and instinctual life. However, the response of the parents is ambiguous. Do they groan and weep because:

• Of the physical anguish of childbirth?
• The baby has arrived, suggesting it might not be entirely welcome?
• They are aware of the ‘dangerous world' into which the child has been born?

Whichever it is, the birth of the child is not a source of joy but of fear and pain.

Similarly, the care of the parents (exemplified by the father's hands and the swaddling bands) is not experienced as safety and concern. Instead, it is portrayed as restraining and imprisoning. The child must fight against the limits imposed by the parents. Defeated in its first struggles, the baby then sulks upon the breast, so that what might be interpreted by the mother as rest and trust is, in fact, resentment.

Infant Sorrow is a companion poem to Infant Joy in Songs of Innocence, in which we see what the mother imagines are the baby's feelings. However, readers should not be tempted to say that one is ‘true' and the other a false view. Blake recognizes that both states co-exist in human beings.

Imagery and Symbolism

Child

Infant Sorrow depends upon the reader's ideas about children. In Blake's time, newborn children could be seen as images of innocence, as in Infant Joy and in Cradle Song. In the New Testament, Jesus says that the kingdom of God belongs to those who become like little children in their innocence and humility. Some Christians believed that children arrived fresh from God and thus retain their memory of him, an idea popular with the Romantics. Children, therefore, reflect the creativity and goodness of God. Followers of Rousseau would see a baby as naturally good and with an innate capacity to learn and grow, which society's demands crush and distort. (See Social / political background > The spirit of rebellion – politics.)

Other Christians in Blake's day believed that children came into the world as inheritors of original sin, so were ‘bad' until they had accepted personal salvation.

In this poem, the baby is seen as being filled with energy and instinctual life, which can appear negative and destructive. However, according to Blake, these are positive attributes, so when he uses the term ‘fiend', it is not with its usual negative connotations.

Piping / Cloud

This echoes the first poem in Songs of Innocence, but the infant's loud wailing and knowing awareness of the negative aspects of the world here, is a world away from the innocence of the child in the cloud of Introduction (I). Similarly, there is a marked contrast to the ‘cloud' of the earthly body, which contains an innocent soul in The Little Black Boy, and the fiendish contents of the cloud in Infant Sorrow.