The Full Text of “Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)”
1When voices of children are heard on the green,
2And whisperings are in the dale,
3The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
4My face turns green and pale.
5Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
6And the dews of night arise;
7Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
8And your winter and night in disguise.
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Introduction
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British visionary poet William Blake included two versions of "Nurse's Song" in his self-published collection Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). In the Innocence version of the poem, a nurse (something like a modern-day nanny) finds joy in watching the children in her care play in a field at the end of the day. In this "Nurse's Song," by contrast, the nurse takes no such pleasure in childhood innocence. Instead, she seems to resent the way the children remind her of her own youth and even to feel that the children's play is a waste of time and a form of deception.
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Summary
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When I hear children's voices echoing throughout the grassy field and whispers in the valley, I remember my own youth clearly, and my face looks sickly.
I tell the children in my care, "It's time to go home now. The sun has gone and the mists of night have begun to arrive. You waste your spring days by playing, and you spend your winter nights deceiving yourselves."
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Themes
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Adult Cynicism vs. Childhood Innocence
In the version of "Nurse's Song" found in William Blake’s Songs of Experience, a nurse (something like a modern-day nanny) watches the children in her care playing outside. While her counterpart in Blake's Songs of Innocence finds a similar scene charming, it makes this nurse's face turn green—with envy, revulsion, or a bit of both. To this cynical speaker, it seems that childhood is not innocent, joyful, and exciting but rather a "waste[]" of time that soon enough gives way to the dismal reality of adulthood.
On the one hand, the children in this poem are probably having a good time. They are playing, after all. But the descriptions of this play suggest something isn't quite right. Whereas the children in the Innocence version of "Nurse's Song" shout and scream exuberantly, here there are only "whisperings [...] in the dale" (that is, the valley). Their whispering might suggest that there's something furtive or deceitful about their play, that threatening voices surround them, and/or that the nurse's presence has put a damper on their spirits. In any case, childhood no longer quite seems like the totally carefree, happy-go-lucky state presented in Blake's earlier poem.
The sound of the children's play also triggers a memory of the nurse's own "youth,” making her face "turn[] green and pale." Perhaps she is jealous of the children's innocence, or maybe this is a kind of nausea that anticipates all the corrupting forces that await the children in her care as they grow up. Either way, the nurse can't simply let the children be children. Whereas the speaker in the Innocence poem lets the kids stay out late because they are having such a good time, this nurse does no such thing. She calls their play a waste of time, acting as though childhood has no inherent value; it's just something that gets in the way of being an adult.
The nurse also says that the children spend their "winter and night in disguise." Winter and night might represent the end of innocence and the darkness of adult life that the poem implies soon awaits the children. The word "disguise" builds on the mention of "whisperings" from the previous stanza to suggest that there's something sinister and deceptive on the horizon; perhaps the children already on the cusp of adulthood in the nurse’s eyes, and their daytime antics belie darker impulses. What's clear is that their play will soon come to an end.
Other Experience poems deal more directly with life as a child in 18th-century England, often specifically illustrating the cruel realities of the industrial revolution and child labor. Such concerns perhaps lurk in the background here, with the nurse suggesting that future suffering negates any happiness the children might feel when they're young. Though it's hard to pin down the nurse's perspective, she clearly believes that childhood—and the notion of free, unhindered joy—is nothing but a fantasy.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)”
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Lines 1-2
When voices of children are heard on the green,
And whisperings are in the dale,The poem's speaker is the nurse of the title (a woman in charge of a group of children). When the poem begins, it's getting late, and the sun is setting. The children in the nurse's care are still playing outside.
Line 1 actually beings with the same phrase that begins the version of "Nurse's Song" from the Innocence section of Blake's collection, placing these two poems in conversation. In the other "Nurse's Song," the nurse can hear children's voices "on the green" and their laughter from the hill. Here, however, that laughter gets replaced with "whisperings [...] in the dale," or the valley.
The sounds of joy thus give way to something stranger and more disquieting. Perhaps the whispers speak to the fact that the nurse is now excluded from the joys of youth (because she is an adult); it's as though the children have their own club that she's not allowed to join. The whispers might also suggest suspicion, secrecy, or even illicit behavior.
It's not even clear if these whispers belong to the children themselves or to some other, perhaps sinister, presence. That is, maybe those whispers represent threats surrounding the children as night falls.
Note, too, how the poem locates this whispering down below in a valley ("dale"), whereas the children from the Innocence version of this poem are up on a hill. This might represent a kind of fall (in the biblical sense), in which the children descend from the heavenly heights of joy to the murkier depths of immorality and/or suffering.
This poem has a similar metrical sound to its predecessor, mainly written using anapests (trisyllabic feet with a da-da-DUM stress pattern) and iambs (da-DUM):
When voi- | ces of child- | ren are heard | on the green,
And whis- | perings | are in | the dale, -
Lines 3-4
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
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Lines 5-8
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Symbols
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The Rhythms of Nature
In this version of "Nurse's Song," the rhythms of the natural world symbolize the transition from youth to adulthood and from innocence to experience.
The poem links sunlight and spring to childhood innocence. The children are in the freshness of their youth, playing "on the green." They seem safe and happy.
Night, meanwhile, seems to represent the difficult realities of life (and perhaps even outright threats) that lie in wait for the children. The world isn't the protective, nurturing place it appears to be, the poem implies, and the children are frittering away the final moments of their youth by playing rather than preparing for what's to come. The arrival of winter and night, in turn, represents the idea that, one day soon, the warmth and light of their childhood will give way to the cold, harsh world of experience.
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Assonance
Assonance adds to the poem's sing-song feel. This device also calls readers' attention to important moments in the poem. Listen to the string of long /i/ sounds in line 3, for example:
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
These long vowels seem to impose themselves on the line with a suddenness that evokes the sudden onset of the nurse's memories of youth.
In the final three lines, assonance ramps up the intensity of the poem's language and also creates some internal rhyme:
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.Just listen to how those /ay/ sounds in "day," "wasted," and "play" seem to drag the line out, capturing the nurse's contempt for the children's desire to play.
Assonance is also one of the ways that the poem interacts with the other version of "Nurse's Song" that appears in Songs of Innocence and Experience. The assonance and internal rhymes in the Innocence poem feel very playful, light, and child-like, not dissimilar to a nursery rhyme. This "Nurse's Song" seems to subvert that sound and even mock it.
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Juxtaposition
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Repetition
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” 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.
- Green
- Dale
- Dews
- Arise
Green-
A grassy field.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)”
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Form
"Nurse's Song" has a simple form consisting of two quatrains (a.k.a. four-line stanzas). These stanzas follow an ABCB rhyme scheme and alternate between lines of tetrameter and trimeter (more on that in the Meter section of this guide). As such, the poem is a riff on the ballad—a form traditionally set to music, and which here creates a familiar, sing-song rhythm.
This "Nurse's Song," which appears in Blake's Songs of Experience, is in conversation with the "Nurse's Song" in the earlier Songs of Innocence. Reading one informs the other, creating an intertextual contrast between two different ways of treating—and respecting—children. In fact, lines 1, 5, and 6 are carbon copies of the earlier previous poem!
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Meter
"Nurse's Song" mainly uses anapests (trisyllabic feet that go da-da-DUM) and iambs (da-DUM). The first and third lines of each stanza have four feet (tetrameter) while the second and fourth lines of each stanza have just three (trimeter). Here's the first stanza as an example of this meter in action:
When voi- | ces of chil- | dren are heard | on the green,
And whis- | perings are in | the dale,
The days | of my youth | rise fresh | in my mind,
My face | turns green | and pale.This light, bouncy meter is deceptive. The poem sounds musical and lighthearted, but it's actually talking about the end of childhood innocence.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Nurse's Song" has a simple rhyme scheme. In each stanza, the second and fourth lines rhyme:
ABCB DEFE
This is the typical rhyme scheme of ballad stanzas. Again, the poem's music is simple and predictable—perhaps deceptively so, given the nurse's dark take on childhood innocence.
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is the nurse of a title, a woman tasked with looking after a group of children (rather than a medical professional in the modern sense of the title). Unlike her counterpart in the Songs of Innocence "Nurse's Song," this nurse doesn't seem to care for her children all that much. They remind her of her younger self, which makes her feel sick to her stomach. This might be because she's jealous of the children's innocence, has regrets about the way her own life turned out, or has concern's about the vulnerable children's safety.
In any case, the nurse disapproves of the children's play, calling it a waste of time. The fact that she mentions winter and night in the poem's final moments might also suggest that she believes the children's carefree youth will soon come to an end.
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“Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Setting
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"Nurse's Song" takes place somewhere outside as the day draws to a close. The children in the nurse's care are off playing "on the green" and "in the dale" (a valley).
In the version of "Nurse's Song" presented in Songs of Innocence, the children are playing on a hill. The fact that they're physically lower in this poem perhaps represents the speaker's low opinion of them and their behavior. It might also symbolically represent a fall from the innocence of childhood into the corruption of adulthood. Of course, it's also possible that those "whisperings" don't belong to the children at all but rather come from some other threatening force, lurking in the background of their play. What's clear is that the world of this poem feels more sinister than that of its Innocence counterpart.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)”
Literary Context
William Blake (1757-1827) is a poet unlike any other. Often considered one of the first of the English Romantics, he also stands apart from the movement as a unique philosopher and artist.
Blake wrote two poems titled "Nurse's Songs" and included them in his best-known work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. 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.
In the version of "Nurse's Song" found in the Innocence section of the collection, the titular nurse clearly cares for her children and finds joy in their play. The nurse in this Experience version of the poem, meanwhile, seems to resent her charges. While the children's voices fill the Innocence poem with laughter, they don't get the chance to speak in the Experience poem. And while that poem presents an idyllic vision of childhood, this suggests that childhood innocence is fleeting, deceptive, and doomed.
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 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—unlike those in this poem—were forced to work in factories, dig in mines, and sweep chimneys.
This increasingly mechanized and factory-driven society made thinkers like Blake worry that people were losing touch with their place in the natural order—and thus with their humanity. Blake was particularly appalled by the child labor that marked this era, seeing it as a consequence of the way that mechanization and conformism cut people off from their naturally independent imaginations.
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More “Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)” Resources
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External Resources
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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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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 Experience — Check out the full book as Blake originally published it, including his beautiful artwork.
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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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