The two poems I'm discussing for this week's readings are "The Lamb" and "The Sick Rose" by William Blake. "The Lamb" is a poem that is structured with two stanzas and rhyming couplets in which the speaker is asking a lamb if it knows who created it. With a tone that manages to both question and affirm the nature of God's existence, the speaker presents a metaphor of God as a lamb while alluding to all creatures as God-like in nature. Blake points to the godliness in all things in the following lines: "For he calls himself a Lamb. /He is meek & he is mild; /He became a little child. /I a child and thou a lamb" (24). The speaker equates a child, a lamb and God as similar in likeness yet simultaneously implies that there is a clear power structure in the comparison. In terms of teaching this poem, I would be most interested in my students understanding of the lamb metaphor. I might ask them to consider the capital "L" versus the lowercase "l" and what, if any, significance it lends to a reader's interpretation of the lamb metaphor. 

   In "The Sick Rose," Blake offers another two stanza poem with a far less innocent tone and metaphor. The speaker appears to worry about the health of a rose that is invaded by the ever phallic "invisible worm / That flies in the night" (Blake 24). As a symbol of a woman's purity, the rose functions as a delicate object of a beauty under constant threat of ruin as it naturally exists in a "howling storm" (Blake 24). I would love to ask my students to consider the symbolism of the storm and how it affects their interpretations of the poem. I might even consider asking my students why the speaker chooses to attribute a "dark, secret love" (Blake 25) to the worm and how that affects the overall tone of the poem.