The Lamb, from Songs of Innocence

William Blake published Songs of Innocence in 1789, printing and coloring the plates himself by relief etching. Text and picture were cut on the same copper plate, so each copy came out slightly different. Fewer than thirty complete copies made by Blake are known today. Project Gutenberg carries a collected edition of his poems.

Where this text comes fromThe poem is built almost entirely of questions, and a child is asking them of an animal that cannot answer. That form is doing theological work in a book aimed at children: the questions are the ones adults ask about creation, put into a voice that has not yet learned they are difficult. Blake cut the words and the picture onto the same copper plate, so no two surviving copies are identical in color and the text sits inside its own illustration rather than beside it. Printed editions differ from one another in punctuation, and the one linked below keeps the older verb form, Dost thou, that Blake engraved.

What you might not noticeThree question marks appear in 307 characters and not one of them is answered inside the fragment you type. The first line asks exactly what the ninth asks, and this edition gives the first no question mark at all. Source

What it trainsThree question marks in three sentences means the sentence often ends on Shift and the question mark rather than on the full stop, which is unusual enough that the hand keeps reaching for the period out of habit. Eight commas and two semicolons fill the rest, and the semicolons arrive in the middle of questions rather than between statements, which is a construction almost nobody writes today. Twelve capitals, nine of them inside sentences, and several of those fall on words a modern printer would leave lower case. The vocabulary is deliberately simple, nothing over eight letters and most of it words a child would use, so this is one of the few passages here where speed and accuracy can both be pushed at once without a trap waiting at the end.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg