Nurse's Song (Experience): Poet & Context

Nurse’s Song (Experience): Poet & Context

Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song (Experience)’: Plot

• The central figure is a nurse, who implores the playing children to return home as evening falls.
• There is an emphasis on loss; the children are not enjoying their play, instead they are whispering in fear of the harmful consequences of staying out at dusk.

Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song (Experience)’: Structure & Language Techniques

• The poem uses quadrameter, creating a weightier tone compared to the trimeter used in the Innocence version.
• Blake uses repetition (“And…And…”), signifying a desperate or urgent tone from the Nurse.

Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song (Experience)’: Themes & Linking Poems

• The themes include: loss of innocence, suppression of desire, and authority.
• Links can be made with ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Experience), with its similar themes of lost innocence and forced maturity.

Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song (Experience)’: Key Quotes

• “But the youth of the day are away” - Symbolizes the loss of joy and innocence.
• “And their winter & night in disguise” - Represents increasing darkness/deception of the experience world.

Blake’s ‘Nurse’s Song (Experience)’: Poet & Context

• The Romantic poet William Blake presents a critique of a society that stifles the joy and innocence of youth.
• This poem forms part of the ‘Songs of Experience’, which represents the fallen world of adulthood, in Blake’s illuminated book.
• The ‘Experience’ version of ‘Nurse’s Song’ proposes a more cynical view of the world compared to the ‘Innocence’ version. The nurse’s concern for the children’s safety reflects Blake’s broader societal commentary on the dangerous limitations that institutions can impose on individuals, particularly the young.