Critical appreciation: "Laughing Song"

Critical discussion of "Laughing Song" is rare. Up until the 1980s, most critics
brushed the poem off as a flighty, not terribly interesting exercise. For example, the
earliest reference to the poem does not contain any analysis, only showing it alongside
an earlier version. G.L. Keynes's 1910 note "William Blake's 'Laughing Song': A New
Version" includes a copy of "Song 2nd by a Young Shepherd" (found written on a fly-
leaf of Blake's Poetical Sketches) followed by "Laughing Song." Keynes does not
discuss the significance of the differences between the two poems.

Perhaps initiating the dismissal of the poem as a fanciful undertaking, Joseph

Wicksteed understands "the dimpling stream, the green woods, the air and the hills,
the meadows and the grasshopper and the 'painted' birds [of 'Laughing Song' to] all
join in to swell our own sweet chorus of laughter" (88). Hazard Adams may attempt a
more subtle reading of the poem, but "Laughing Song's" interest for him lies in its
placement between "Spring" and "The Lamb" (these latter poems, Adams claims, are
both about Jesus). Although the children of "Laughing Song" might appear to be the
origin of laughter, it is actually centered everywhere and its circumference is nowhere
(229). Thus, the green hill laughing is "a massive personification which makes
personification more than an isolated device" (229). Adams concludes that this
"principle of animation culminates in the identification of Jesus with everything"
(229). Jesus, I hasten to add, is absent from the poem.

E.D. Hirsch opens his discussion by noting Blake's transference of the poem from
Innocence to Experience and back again. Yet instead of analyzing this movement,
Hirsch claims "Laughing Song" is just "a pastoral poem about children and
joy....Essentially the poem is a combination of traditional pastoral and traditional
children's poetry, with the key element of religious vision left out" (189). Hirsch
understands the speaker of the poem to be Blake himself, and the poem to belong "to
the end of Blake's literary apprenticeship rather than to his poetical majority" (189).
Martin Price furthers critical disparagement of the poem: "The landscape of
Innocence is a fostering, humanized landscape. It echoes human songs and
laughter....The 'Laughing Song' is one of the simplest of the Songs" (41). D.G.
Gilham's analysis of the poem is similarly superficial, although his understanding of it
as an alternative to "The Little Vagabond" is provocative: the "Laughing Song"
speaker "lets himself go, and, because he gives himself up, all nature seems to join in
with his mirth....There is no desperate mood of longing here, such as the vagabond
shows, but an easy, self-forgetful chiming in of youthful vigour with the heady
intoxication of spring" (202).

Thomas Dilworth's article "Blake's Argument with Newberry in 'Laughing Song'" was
the first pointed discussion of the poem. Dilworth reads "Laughing Song" as an
antithesis to John Newberry's "How to Laugh," a lyric which appeared in his A Pretty
Book for Children (1761). Blake and Newberry share the same subject and use the
same laughing sound: Ha, Ha, He. Yet Blake's lyric lacks expressions of pain and
humanizes Nature's various aspects instead of personifying her as a whole: "Joyful
innocence is here shared equally by man and by nature in its broad diversity and
particularity" (36).
Myra Glazer returns to the critical dismissal of the poem in her article, "Blake's Little
Black Boys: On the Dynamics of Blake's Composite Art." Glazer focuses on how
"The Little Black Boy" changes meaning depending on the poems that surround it.
"The Little Black Boy" preceded by "Laughing Song" differs from "The Little Black
Boy" preceded by "The Lamb." According to Glazer, "Laughing Song" is "a frothy
celebration of a joyously animated song....[which] depicts, and brings about, by visual
image and word, shared joy, and we become the invisible guests in the collective
scene on the plate" (225). Yet in his subtle examination of the engraving, Zachary
Leader reads the design of "Laughing Song" as a deliberate recalling of "the
attenuated pastoralism of [Thomas] Stothard's designs (engraved by Blake in 1783)
for Joseph Riston's A Select Collection of English Songs" (52). Blake alters his
pastoral figure with an "unfashionably simple costume [and a] sturdy, muscular body
[which] are [not] in the least like anything Stothard might have produced" (53). The
poem is similarly derivative of eighteenth-century pastoral, though Blake adapts the
literary tradition as well: for example, he re- names "Edessa and Lyca and Emilie"
"Mary and Susan and Emily" (52).

Also focusing on the illustration, Stanley Gardner understands the differences

between the engraving and the poem as a way into "Laughing Song": none of the
people in the illustration "is young enough to be described in the terms of the poem,
and none is behaving in a manner recognizable as 'innocent' in those terms" (50). The
"painted birds" are the verbal hint of "an adult, or at least adolescent, occasion" (50).
Gardner concludes his analysis somewhat vaguely with the assessment that the poem
conveys "the shaping influence of Innocence on polite social intercourse" (50).
Building on Leader's and Gardner's insights, Norma Greco's reading of "Laughing
Song" takes issue with earlier critics' cavalier dismissal of the poem. "Laughing
Song," Greco contends, is not only "an intriguing display of the hermeneutics of
Blake's visual-verbal discourse, but also a provocative and important comment on the
limitations of innocence and artistic creation in a fallen world" (69). The word
"painted," in particular, "directs us to Blake's composite art: the verbally 'painted
birds' and the equally 'painted' birds of the illustration," underscoring the connection
between the speaker of the poem and the man of the engraving (70-71). The painted
birds and the children "are bound by the same conditions of temporality" (70-71).
Thus, "Laughing Song" is about the "necessary compromise of art with the material
world....[which] recalls to us our own vulnerability to the same materiality" (72).