Gillham observes that whereas the child-speaker of ‘The Lamb’ is confident in, and proud of, his knowledge of the lamb (‘Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee …’), the speaker of ‘The Tyger’ is marked by uncertainty. In his book Blake’s Contrary States: The ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ as Dramatic Poems, the Blake scholar D. ‘The Lamb’, one of the Songs of Innocence, finds its counterpart in ‘The Tyger’ from Songs of Experience: Speaker, lamb, and Christ are all linked by their innocence – making ‘The Lamb’, among all of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, one of the most innocent of all. The child is exactly the sort of ‘meek’ Christian who might be viewed as an inheritor of the Earth. But the word ‘meek’ in the second stanza recalls Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth’ (Matthew 5:5).
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