The Full Text of “Infant Sorrow”
1My mother groan'd! my father wept.
2Into the dangerous world I leapt:
3Helpless, naked, piping loud;
4Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
5Struggling in my father's hands:
6Striving against my swaddling bands:
7Bound and weary I thought best
8To sulk upon my mother's breast.
The Full Text of “Infant Sorrow”
1My mother groan'd! my father wept.
2Into the dangerous world I leapt:
3Helpless, naked, piping loud;
4Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
5Struggling in my father's hands:
6Striving against my swaddling bands:
7Bound and weary I thought best
8To sulk upon my mother's breast.
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“Infant Sorrow” Introduction
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English Romantic poet William Blake's "Infant Sorrow" appears in the Experience section of his major collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). In this poem, an infant speaker describes the first few moments of their life, lamenting that they've entered a "dangerous world" in a "helpless" little body. Soon enough, the speaker decides that it's pointless to protest: they didn't ask to be born, but they're going to have to put up with it. The poem contrasts starkly with its companion piece in the Innocence section, "Infant Joy," which portrays birth as a moment of mystical ecstasy.
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“Infant Sorrow” Summary
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My mother moaned in pain, my father sobbed, and I jumped energetically into my life in this dangerous world. I was powerless, naked, screaming at the top of my lungs. I was like a little devil wrapped in a cloud.
I fought against my father's grip, and tried to break free of the blankets that restricted my movements. Trapped and exhausted, I resigned myself to moping in my mother's embrace.
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“Infant Sorrow” Themes
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Life and Suffering
Spoken in the voice of a newborn baby, "Infant Sorrow" suggests that life is full of hardship and pain. While the baby in "Infant Joy" (this poem's companion piece) glories in entering the world, this speaker knows that, from a painful birth onward, life is going to be a tough ride (and one, incidentally, that the speaker never asked for!). In this poem, existence is inseparable from suffering: being born means being tied to a world of pain by a helpless body.
Entering this world, the poem suggests, means trouble right from the start. The speaker’s mother “groan[s]” in the pain of labor as the speaker is born—and more than that, the speaker’s father “we[eps],” perhaps not just tears of joy: he might be upset that this baby is here at all, or he might be worried about how he’s going to support it. (It’s worth remembering that Blake’s 18th-century London was a difficult place to be a kid: poverty and grueling child labor were both widespread.) This baby is entering a “dangerous world” in which people face suffering from the instant they arrive, and can’t necessarily rely on their parents for protection.
Coming into this “dangerous world” is even tougher because of just how powerless babies are. The infant speaker, “helpless” and “naked,” can’t exert any control over their situation. They didn’t ask to be born, but here they are, a soul trapped in a dependent infant body “like a fiend hid in a cloud.” All that they can do is accept their fate, resolving to “sulk” on their “mother’s breast” rather than struggle any more. (That “sulking” might also punnily suggest “sucking”: the baby, giving up and eating, resigns itself to being alive.)
This baby’s predicament, the poem suggests, is everyone’s predicament. The “swaddling bands” (a kind of tight wrapping used to keep babies still) in which the speaker is “bound” might be read symbolically as an image of the basic difficulty of life: everyone alive is “bound” to a body that’s trapped in a world of sufferings.
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Independence vs. Conformity
Through its portrait of an enraged baby who enters the world “like a fiend hid in a cloud,” "Infant Sorrow" suggests that society restricts, represses and demonizes people's instinctive energy—the wild souls they’re born with. Try though the speaker might to resist this oppression, they’re ultimately forced to “sulk[ily]” resign themselves to their fate.
The speaker comes into the world full of vitality and life; in fact, they “leap[]” into the “dangerous world” (an image that suggests their soul existed before birth), and “pip[e] loud,” screaming with seemingly untameable vigor. Coming to the world makes them feel “like a fiend hid in a cloud”—in other words, like a demon concealed in the “cloud” of a fleshly body. (To Blake, this demonic energy wouldn’t have been a bad thing: he often used images of devils and fiends to suggest exuberant life force, especially the kind that organized religion and civil society liked to quash.) This image suggests that a human soul’s natural state is powerful, energetic, independent, and rebellious.
But society can and does tame the speaker's energies—and quickly! Not only is the baby restricted by its helpless little body, its parents do their best to repress it, too. Though the baby “struggle[es]” against its “father’s hands,” it can’t escape being wrapped in “swaddling bands” (tight blankets meant to keep babies still); it’s no match for an adult. For that matter, the wide and “dangerous” world will soon oppress the speaker even more. The baby’s physical restrictions also suggest societal ones: civilized conventionality, the poem suggests, stamps out people's individuality and independence—the “fiend[ish]” energy they’re born with.
The poem thus suggests that society prevents human beings to be what they're meant to be. Right from birth, the speaker is oppressed both by well-meaning parents and a cruel, “dangerous” wider world.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Infant Sorrow”
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Line 1
My mother groan'd! my father wept.
"Infant Sorrow"—and its speaker's life—begins with groans and tears. The poem's first line describes the speaker's first encounter with the world, the day of their birth. Things don't seem to be going especially well:
My mother groan'd! my father wept.
In the most optimistic possible reading, the mother's moans might just be the ordinary pains of childbirth; the father could be weeping tears of joy at the miracle of new life. But the "Sorrow" of the poem's title hints otherwise.
The likelihood, then, is that the mother and father are suffering. Perhaps they didn't want this baby; perhaps they feel they won't have the means to support it as it grows. (Blake's poetry often lamented the plight of impoverished children.) Perhaps they know from experience that to be born is to enter a world of great misery—and their "sorrow" anticipates what the child will have to bear. The parallelism of this first line—"My mother groan'd! my father wept"—links the mother and father together, as though everyone in the room were suffering the same pain.
All this ominous weeping and moaning strikes a dramatic contrast with this poem's companion piece, "Infant Joy." That poem, which appeared in Blake's Songs of Innocence, depicted a baby's delight at entering the world. This baby, however, is entering the world of the Songs of Experience, where life is often crueler and darker. This poem will look at all that's painful about coming into this world.
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Line 2
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
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Lines 3-4
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud. -
Lines 5-6
Struggling in my father's hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands: -
Lines 7-8
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.
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“Infant Sorrow” Symbols
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The Swaddling Bands
The baby's "swaddling bands"—the tight blankets that restrain it—might be read as a wider symbol of restriction: the restrictions of society and of the body.
While the baby's swaddling bands might be meant to make it feel safe and snug, in reality they suppress the baby's natural energy. In doing so, the bands stand in for all the ways that society might limit the instinctive wildness of the human spirit (e.g. through poverty or organized religion, two common enemies in Blake's poetry). The baby's parents might have good intentions, but they do society's bidding here, forcing the baby to conform against its will.
For that matter, the bands might suggest the limitations and restrictions of the human body itself! Babies are born in helpless bodies, and even adult bodies are limited by illness and death. Having a body, this symbolism suggests, can feel like a hindrance as much as a delight.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Infant Sorrow” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Caesura
The poem uses caesura to create an atmosphere of misery, confusion, and oppression. Line 1 barely gets off the ground before it is interrupted by a dramatic exclamation mark:
My mother groan'd! || my father wept.
This divides the line in half (creating two parallel phrases), and means readers might linger on the word "groan'd" a beat longer, imagining a long moan of pain. By disturbing the poem's flow before it's even gotten started, this caesura also subtly reinforces the idea that the world will likewise restrict the flow of the speaker's energy.
Soon after, line 3 also uses a double whammy of comma caesura. Here, the speaker describes themselves as:
Helpless, || naked, || piping loud;
These commas compress the line, packing it with three distinct descriptions that capture the speaker's confused, powerless state. Even though caesurae often slow a line down, here they quicken the pace, putting the reader right there in the room with the screaming newborn baby.
It's worth noting, too, how these commas work hand in hand with asyndeton (the lack of a conjunction word like "and"). It's as though the speaker is gathering their first impressions of life, perceiving their own helplessness, nakedness, and noisiness in dizzying real time.
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Parallelism
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Pun
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Simile
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"Infant Sorrow" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Groan'd
- Piping
- Fiend
- Hid
- Striving
- Swaddling bands
- Sulk
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A contraction of "groaned"; the speaker's mother is moaning in pain.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Infant Sorrow”
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Form
"Infant Sorrow" uses a short, tight quatrain form. A lot happens within the poem's two four-line stanzas: the events here are as compressed as the baby in its "swaddling bands."
In the first stanza, the speaker is born, struggling and screaming with wild energy as they enter this "dangerous world." It doesn't take long, though, for that spirit to be contained. The second stanza shows the speaker "bound and weary," unable to break free from their father's arms, and resigned to their fate: life in a human body and a restrictive society.
Like many poems in Songs of Experience, "Infant Sorrow" has a companion piece in Songs of Innocence, "Infant Joy," whose baby speaker feels considerably happier about coming into the world than this poem's speaker does.
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Meter
Like many Blake poems (and like the folk rhymes that Blake's poetry draws upon), "Infant Sorrow" is written in accentual meter. That means that it uses a certain number of beats per line, but doesn't stick to any one metrical foot in particular.
This poem uses accentual tetrameter: lines with four strong stresses apiece. Here's how that sounds in lines 5-6:
Struggling in my father's hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:Both of these lines start with heavy stressed syllables that evoke the speaker's struggle to break free from their father and their "swaddling bands." Compare that to the rhythms of the closing line:
To sulk upon my mother's breast.
As the speaker gives up and accepts their fate, the stresses also fall back and become more regular; in fact, this line is in neat iambic tetrameter (that is, it's built from four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm).
Through accentual meter, then, Blake shapes each line to the poem's action, making this short-but-powerful tale move just like its frustrated speaker does.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Infant Sorrow" uses rhyming couplets throughout, like this:
AABB
This simple pattern is typical of Blake, who uses couplets frequently throughout Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In this particular poem, the neat rhymes might reflect the constrictions and limitations of living in this world—the bindings the speaker fruitlessly "struggl[es]" against. The rhymes feel tight as the "swaddling bands" the speaker resists.
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“Infant Sorrow” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a newborn baby. Born with a naturally independent spirit, this baby doesn't want to be held back. Alas, it soon finds that, when one's born with a "helpless" infant body, one really doesn't have much choice but to resign oneself to one's fate: life in a "dangerous" and oppressive world.
There's something ironic going on in Blake's choice of speaker here. The word "infant" originally meant "incapable of speech"; newborns don't generally get the chance to speak for themselves. The poem thus gives voice to a voiceless figure, putting words to the baby's outraged screams. This baby thus becomes a spokesperson for everyone who's gone through the indignity of being born.
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“Infant Sorrow” Setting
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The poem is set during the first few moments of its speaker's life. As the newborn speaker "leap[s]" into the "dangerous world," screaming and struggling, they fill the room with noise and chaos. But by the end of the poem, the speaker has stopped fighting, resolving to silently "sulk upon my mother's breast" instead.
Readers might thus get the sense that this poem is set on the border between two worlds: a world that exists before life on earth—the world from which the speaker "leap[s]" into physical being—and our own "dangerous" and restrictive world, in which the speaker's wild, instinctive energy will be constrained by the metaphorical "swaddling bands" of convention and oppression.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Infant Sorrow”
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Literary Context
William Blake (1757-1827) is a poet unlike any other. Often considered one of the first English Romantics, he also stands apart from any movement as a unique philosopher, prophet, and artist.
Blake published "Infant Sorrow" as part of the Experience section of his best-known work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). This two-part book examines what Blake called "the two contrary states of the human soul," and many of the poems in Songs of Innocence have a counterpart in Songs of Experience—a twin poem that reads the same subjects from a new perspective. This poem has "Infant Joy" as its mirror, a poem that presents an ecstatic vision of new life. "Infant Sorrow" also shares common ground with "A Little Boy Lost," in which a young child is deemed a "fiend" by a priest—the high representative of organized religion—for daring to think differently.
Blake didn't just write poetry: he also designed, engraved, printed, painted, and published illuminated manuscripts using a technique he called the "infernal method." Blake painted his poems and pictures on copper plates with a resilient ink, then burned away the excess copper in a bath of acid—the opposite of the process most engravers used. But then, Blake often did the opposite of what other people did, believing that it was his role to "reveal the infinite that was hid" by custom and falsehood.
Even among the often countercultural Romantics, then, Blake was an outlier. Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself—no stranger to a wild vision—once remarked that he was "in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr. Blake."
While Blake was never widely known during his lifetime, he has become one of the most famous and beloved of poets since his death, and writers from Allen Ginsberg to Olga Tokarczuk to Philip Pullman claim him as a major influence.
Historical Context
William Blake was a deeply religious man, but he was highly critical of organized religion. He was born to a family of Dissenters, a group of English Protestants who broke away from and rebelled against the Church of England (and instilled in Blake an early distrust of the religious status quo). He saw top-down religious structures as getting in the way of a more direct relationship between humanity and God.
Blake also spent much of his life railing against the cruelties of 19th-century British society. And he had plenty to rail against! The England of Blake's time was just getting caught up in the Industrial Revolution, a period during which the economy shifted from farming to manufacturing. The countryside began to empty out, and the cities began to swell. And English class divisions, always intense, began to seem even more pronounced as impoverished workers lived cheek-by-jowl with the fashionable and wealthy in newly crowded towns.
Workers during the early Industrial Revolution got a pretty raw deal. Even young children were forced to work in factories, dig in mines, and sweep chimneys (an absurdly dangerous job, contrary to the cheery Mary Poppins image many are familiar with: chimney-sweeps as young as three or four years old regularly suffocated in narrow flues). Adults didn't have it much easier. With few regulations to keep factory owners in check, bosses could impose impossible working hours, or withhold pay for any number of trifling offenses. Perhaps the child in this poem anticipates a life of toil and economic hardship.
For Blake, the factories of the Industrial Revolution represented a form of physical and mental enslavement—the "mind-forg'd manacles" mentioned in his poem "London." His poetry proceeds from both a deep commitment to God and an even deeper dissatisfaction with the ways in which society spoils this spiritual relationship.
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More “Infant Sorrow” Resources
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External Resources
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Blake's Biography — Learn more about Blake's life and work at the website of the British Library.
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Songs of Innocence and of Experience — Visit the Blake Archive to see this poem as Blake originally published it in a beautiful illuminated manuscript.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of both "Infant Sorrow" and "Infant Joy."
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Blake's Visions — Watch an excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's religious visions.
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A Blake Documentary — Listen to Blake scholars discussing the poet's life and work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake
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