Nurse’s Song 1 and Nurse’s Song 2 by Blake

Nurse’s Song 1 and Nurse’s Song 2 by Blake

In looking at the poems Nurse’s Song 1 and Nurse’s Song 2, one has to look at the titles of the book in which they are in, the words themselves, and the etchings that go along with the poem. In the Nurse’s Song 1, the book that it is in is called Songs of Innocence. The title of the book shows to the reader that the narrator is writing from the point of view that she is watching children play, watching the innocence of the children in front of her. The second poem, Nurse’s Song 2, falls under the title Songs of Experience. In this poem, the narrator talks of the memories she has from her childhood.

In song one, the scenery is described in the very beginning of the poem. The narrator is sitting in a pasture, under a tree, in a valley, watching children playing. She sits in the shade of the branches as the children laugh and play holding hands. This can be seen not only in the verse, but also in the etching that the poem is written on. In the etching, the children playing a circle, looking much like they are playing the child’s game, “ring around the rosy”. The older woman, age is not mentioned in the poem, sits under the shade of a tree with what looks like cross stitching in her lap, or some sort of sewing. The children seem to be protected with a canopy of branched and the sun is setting in the back ground behind the large rolling green hills. The title of the poem itself is entwined with branches, green with being young. This sapling like title shows how young and inexperienced the children really are. The freshness of spring and young is throughout this entire etching.

The actual poem is very easy to read nothing in it seems to hide anything from the reader. It is very sim...

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...are off into the distance while her hair is being brushed by the older woman. She seems not to have the look of innocence that the children had in the first song.

In looking at both poems, they have two separate meanings from each other, but can be tied together by a the simple lesson of living. Song one is about being young and living freely as a child in the spring time. While the second song, by having the children come into the house and stop their foolish playing for they do not know what comes to them later in life, shows that the nurse is thinking of the aging process and wondering where her life has gone. The titles of the books in which the poems are in also give away this meaning to the poems. Nurse’s Song 1 from Songs of Innocence, innocence being youth and spring time, while Nurse’s Song 2 from Songs of Experience is linked to aging and death in winter.