The Echoing Green, the sun does arise

The Echoing Green comes from Songs of Innocence, the set Blake issued in 1789. The green of the title is the village common where the games are played. Blake worked as an engraver by trade and sold his illuminated books directly to a small circle of buyers. The full collection is on Project Gutenberg.

Where this text comes fromThe poem runs a whole day from sunrise to the end of play,. Every line opens with a capital, as verse did then, and only two words inside the lines carry one: John, a name, and Spring, the season. What you copy is the first two of three stanzas: the morning games and Old John’s memory of his own, stopping before the third stanza sends the children home at dusk.

What you might not noticeThe quoted speech at the end opens with a single quote and closes with its partner, and a third mark of the same shape appears earlier as the apostrophe in bells. All three are one keystroke, doing two separate jobs. Source

What it trainsThe Shift key never gets a long rest here. Twenty-two capitals in twenty lines, nineteen of them inside a sentence rather than at its start. Seventeen of those are line openings and the other two are John and Spring, so the rule is simple: every new line starts with Shift, and you have to feel the line break coming. The second difficulty is the opposite of the first: the words themselves are very short, averaging just over four letters, so the hands move fast between capitals and the shift is easy to drop. Ten commas and three semicolons carry ninety words across only three sentences, which means thirty words go by before a full stop gives you anywhere to stop and check what you have typed.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg