Though he was a printmaker and painter, as well as the composer of a number of  mythic verse epics, we remember William Blake (1757–1827) largely for his 1789 “Songs of Innocence,” paired with “Songs of Experience” in a single volume in 1794. His two “Holy Thursday” poems, which ran in the Sun this past April 6, exemplify these “Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” 

Blake’s “London,” which appeared as Poem of the Day in September 2022, is a “Song of Experience” without an “innocent” mirror image. Though today’s Poem of the Day, “The Ecchoing Green,” is often read as a counterpart to “The Garden of Love” in “Songs of Experience,” it might also find its opposite echo in the industrial urban despair of “London” and so provide a fit bookend for that poem.

While in “London” a single, isolated speaker walks the blighted city, “The Ecchoing Green” is a village poem in both its setting and its first-person plural speaker. “London” observes, in the city’s “midnight streets,” a cursed humanity that rarely survives past infancy. In “The Ecchoing Green,” by contrast, the sun rises and sets on children playing, while old people watch and remember their own happy childhoods. The bouncing dimeter couplets suggest both the rhythms of play and the joyful echo of voices, back and forth in the bright, innocent summer air. 

The Ecchoing Green 
by William Blake 
 
The sun does arise, 
And make happy the skies. 
The merry bells ring 
To welcome the Spring. 
The sky-lark and thrush, 
The birds of the bush, 
Sing louder around, 
To the bells’ cheerful sound.  
While our sports shall be seen 
On the Ecchoing Green. 
 
Old John, with white hair  
Does laugh away care, 
Sitting under the oak, 
Among the old folk,  
They laugh at our play,  
And soon they all say. 
‘Such, such were the joys.  
When we all girls & boys,  
In our youth-time were seen,  
On the Ecchoing Green.’ 
 
Till the little ones weary 
No more can be merry 
The sun does descend, 
And our sports have an end:  
Round the laps of their mothers,  
Many sisters and brothers, 
Like birds in their nest, 
Are ready for rest; 
And sport no more seen, 
On the darkening Green.

___________________________________________
With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.