Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Gave thee life & bid thee feed, By the stream & o’er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice! Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Little Lamb I’ll tell thee, Little Lamb I’ll tell thee! He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems
Summary
A child speaks to a lamb and asks it, gently, whether it knows who made it — who gave it life, its food by the stream and meadow, its soft woolly coat, and its tender bleating voice.
In the second stanza, the child answers his own question. The lamb was made by one who “is called by thy name,” for he “calls himself a Lamb” and “became a little child”: God, in the person of Christ, the Lamb of God. Child, lamb, and Christ are bound together in their shared meekness, all “called by his name.”
The poem closes with a soft blessing. Tender, simple, and serene, “The Lamb” is the gentle twin of Blake’s “The Tyger” — and reading the two together is the key to both.
Background
William Blake (1757–1827) — poet, painter, printmaker, and visionary — published “The Lamb” in 1789 in Songs of Innocence, which he later bound together with Songs of Experience (1794) into a single illuminated book “shewing the two contrary states of the human soul.” Like all his work in these collections, the poem was not merely written but engraved and hand-coloured by Blake himself; the plate for “The Lamb” shows a serene pastoral scene of a child, a flock, a cottage, and twining trees — gentle harmony made visible.
The single most important fact about “The Lamb” is that it has a companion. It is the Innocence counterpart to “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience, and Blake intended the two to be read as a pair: the meek lamb and the burning tiger, gentleness and ferocity, two visions of the same created world and the same God. The Christian background runs through every line — the lamb is one of the oldest names for Christ, the “Lamb of God” of the Gospel of John — so that a poem that looks like a simple nursery rhyme is also a small, complete statement of faith.
Analysis and Themes
It is tempting to read “The Lamb” as merely sweet — a child’s pious verse about a cuddly animal. But placed beside “The Tyger,” and read for what it actually claims, it becomes one of the clearest portraits in English of what innocence is, and what experience will later cost.
The Question Answered
The poem asks exactly the same question as “The Tyger” — “who made thee?” — and that shared question is the hinge of Blake’s whole design. The difference is everything. “The Tyger” is a poem of pure questions that never finds an answer; “The Lamb” poses the question in its first stanza and answers it, fully and immediately, in its second: “Little Lamb I’ll tell thee.” That confident answer is the meaning of the poem. This is what innocence sounds like — a state of soul in which the deepest mystery of existence, who made us and why, has a simple, certain, loving reply. The poem is not naive so much as it is a faithful picture of a way of seeing the world in which God is near, knowable, and kind. And reading it against its companion, we feel the stakes of the pairing: experience, in “The Tyger,” is precisely the loss of this serenity — the same question asked again, into a silence that no longer answers back.
Lamb, Child, and Christ Are One
The answer the poem gives is more theologically dense than its plain words suggest. “He is called by thy name, / For he calls himself a Lamb” — the maker shares the lamb’s name because Christ is himself called the Lamb. “He became a little child” — the Incarnation, God born as the infant Jesus. And then the gentle knot is tied: “I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name.” The speaker (a child), the lamb, and Christ (who is both Lamb and Child) are folded into one another, united by their shared meekness and their shared name. The vision is of a creator who is not separate from his creation but continuous with it — who made himself gentle, small, and lowly, so that the meek lamb and the innocent child are living images of God. This is the exact opposite of “The Tyger,” where the maker is a remote and terrifying blacksmith, utterly other than what he forges. Here the maker is “meek & mild,” intimate with and present in everything he has made.
The Voice of Innocence
The poem is spoken by a child, or in a child’s voice, in the form of a little catechism: a question asked and then answered, the way a child might be taught the simplest truths of faith. The diction is deliberately plain and monosyllabic, the lines short and softly repetitive, the whole thing tuned like a nursery rhyme or a cradle song. It would be a mistake to read this simplicity as something Blake looks down on. In his scheme, innocence and experience are “contrary states,” not a lower and a higher one; the innocent vision has its own truth and beauty, and the poem performs that vision rather than merely describing it. The deepest point of the diptych is that neither poem is complete alone. The God of “The Lamb,” meek and mild, and the God of “The Tyger,” who forges fearful symmetry in a furnace, are the same God — seen first with the trusting eyes of innocence, and then with the troubled, questioning eyes of experience. “The Lamb” gives us the whole of the first vision, in all its tenderness, so that we can feel what the second one complicates.
Form and Technique
The poem is built in two stanzas of ten lines each, mostly in soft rhymed couplets and a gentle, lilting measure — short lines of around seven syllables that flow rather than pound. The contrast with “The Tyger” is deliberate and total: where that poem hammers like a smith at an anvil, “The Lamb” murmurs like a lullaby, all soft consonants and tender vowels (“Softest clothing wooly bright,” “Making all the vales rejoice”). The very sound of the verse enacts the meekness it describes.
The structure is shaped by repetition. Each stanza is bracketed by a repeated refrain-couplet: the first opens and closes with “Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee,” and the second moves from “Little Lamb I’ll tell thee” to the closing blessing, “Little Lamb God bless thee.” This framing turns the two stanzas into a clean question-and-answer — the catechism shape at the heart of the poem — and gives it the lulling, circling quality of something chanted to a child. Throughout, Blake plays on the single word Lamb: the animal, the child’s tender name for it, and Christ, all gathered into one. As with all the Songs, the poem was meant to be seen as well as read, set within Blake’s own hand-painted pastoral plate; he kept the old spellings (“wooly,” the ampersands) that still mark the text today.
Notable Lines
Three moments carry the poem’s opening question, its answer, and its closing union of child, lamb, and Christ.
Little Lamb who made thee
Lines 1–2
Dost thou know who made thee
The opening question, and the same one “The Tyger” will ask of its fearsome subject. Spoken softly to a lamb, it sounds like a child’s wonder; but it is the great question of creation itself, here posed in the gentlest possible key.
He is called by thy name,
Lines 13–14
For he calls himself a Lamb:
The answer, and the poem’s quiet theological core. The maker and the made share a name because Christ is himself the Lamb — the creator who made himself meek and lowly, one with the gentle thing he created.
I a child & thou a lamb,
Lines 17–18
We are called by his name.
The gentle climax. Child, lamb, and Christ are folded into a single identity, united by meekness and by a shared name. Creator and creation are not divided here but continuous — the heart of the innocent vision.
Glossary
A few words worth clarifying:
- mead (line 4) — a meadow (poetic and archaic); “o’er the mead” means over the meadow, not the drink.
- vales (line 8) — valleys; the lamb’s voice is “making all the vales rejoice.”
- the Lamb (line 14) — both the animal and a title of Christ, the “Lamb of God,” on which the poem’s whole answer turns.
- meek (line 15) — gentle, humble, mild; the defining quality the lamb, the child, and Christ all share.
In Popular Culture
More than almost any other Blake poem, “The Lamb” has lived through music.
John Tavener’s setting: The poem’s best-known musical incarnation is John Tavener’s “The Lamb” (1982), a brief, hushed piece for unaccompanied choir that the composer wrote in a single afternoon as a birthday gift for his three-year-old nephew. Now a fixture of Christmas carol services, it has become almost inseparable from Blake’s words.
Vaughan Williams’s ambivalence: Ralph Vaughan Williams also set the poem, in his 1958 cycle Ten Blake Songs — though he was famously unsentimental about it, reportedly grumbling that it was “that horrible little lamb — a poem that I hate.” The poet Allen Ginsberg, by contrast, set it to music with real affection in 1969.
Related Poems
If this poem moves you, these three are its natural companions in gentleness and faith.
- The Tyger by William Blake: The fierce companion poem from Songs of Experience, which asks the very same question — who made thee? — but finds only awe and dread; the two poems are meant to be read together, innocence beside experience.
- The Divine Image by William Blake: Another of the Songs of Innocence, a tender hymn declaring that “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” are the very face of God — the same trusting, gentle faith in a kindly creator.
- Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins: A later hymn of praise to the Creator through the wild variety of creation — “Glory be to God for dappled things” — sharing “The Lamb’s” wonder that the world’s creatures point back to their maker.