Blake's "Spring" hardly describes the season at all. There are no buds, no showers, no green fields. Spring arrives instead as sound and touch: a flute, a nightingale, a crowing cock, a child's fingers in a lamb's wool. The central idea is that the year is renewed not by something we watch but by something we join in with, and that birds, children and animals join in together, on equal terms.
The form makes the poem feel like a song rather than a text to be studied. Most lines are tiny, two beats and a few syllables each, and they trot along in rhyming couplets: flute and mute, delight and night, boy and joy, lamb and am. Some rhymes are only approximate (girl and small, kiss and face), and the looseness suits the mood. Nobody is polishing anything here; the words simply tumble out. Each of the three stanzas then ends on the same long line, "Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year." After so many clipped lines, the refrain stretches out like a chorus everyone joins. "Merrily" is first set alone, then doubled, as if the singers were taking a run-up. And "welcome" treats the year as a guest arriving at the door.
The opening is quick-witted: "Sound the flute! / Now it's mute!" A command is followed almost at once by silence. One way to read this is that the instrument hands over to the birds, whose song takes its place, though the poem doesn't insist on it. The birds then fill the whole space and the whole clock: nightingale in the dale, lark in the sky, "Day and night." In the second stanza the camera swings to people, and they are described with the same economy as the birds. "Little boy, / Full of joy; / Little girl, / Sweet and small." The children have no names or stories, only a single quality each. Then comes the poem's best linking of worlds: "Cock does crow, / So do you." The child's voice is set directly beside the animal's, and Blake calls it "Infant noise," not music. In this world, unshaped sound is as welcome as the nightingale's.
The last stanza moves closest of all. The birds were far off, in the dale and the sky, but the lamb is within arm's reach, and the voice becomes personal: "Here I am," "Let me pull / Your soft wool." The senses narrow to touch, with "white neck," "soft wool," "soft face," and the repeated "soft" makes the stanza feel like a caress. "Pull" could sound rough, but it comes wrapped in "Let me," a request that trusts the answer will be yes. Nothing in the stanza fears being hurt. The poem ends with a kiss, then the refrain, so the whole year is welcomed by an act of affection.
The poem belongs to Blake's *Songs of Innocence*, and its simplicity is the point. Blake, who was an engraver as well as a poet, makes a world in which child, animal and season are not separate categories but one chorus. He later joined these poems with a companion set, *Songs of Experience*, so readers often see innocence as one half of a pair. Read with that in mind, the total absence of shadow in "Spring" stands out: no fear, no loss, no winter. That is probably deliberate, though it is an inference from the poem's contrasts rather than something the poem says.
What stays with you is how little the poem asks for. A flute, a few animals, a child's voice, and the belief that a new year deserves to be sung in.