Bedtime is usually a battle, and Blake's nurse loses it gladly. In sixteen lines, a woman in charge of a group of children calls them in at dusk, is told no, and gives way, not grudgingly but with something close to relief. The poem suggests that caring for the young sometimes means knowing when to bend the rule, and that an adult's peace can depend on the noise of children.
Notice how the nurse begins. Before she gives a single order, we learn her state of mind: "My heart is at rest within my breast, / And everything else is still." This is a small paradox. The green and the hill are full of laughter, yet what she feels is stillness. Her calm comes not from silence but from listening. The passive phrasing, voices "are heard" and laughing "is heard", puts her in the position of someone who hears the children more than she watches them. The internal rhyme of "rest" and "breast" settles the line like a sigh.
Then duty arrives. "Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, / And the dews of night arise." Her case rests on facts: sunset, damp air. "Come, come, leave off play, and let us away" is brisk and repetitive, the voice of routine. The children answer in kind with their own doubled word: "No, no, let us play, for it is yet day." Their logic is wonderfully childlike. They don't argue about the time; they point to the scenery. Birds are still flying and "the hills are all covered with sheep," so how can it be night? The nurse's reply, "Well, well," repeats the pattern a third time. "Come, come," "No, no," "Well, well": command, refusal, surrender. The same shape of phrase carries the whole negotiation, and it softens as it goes.
Her compromise is small but telling. She doesn't pretend the day isn't ending. She lets them play "till the light fades away," giving them the last of it. Authority here is shown as patient rather than tyrannical.
The sound of the poem does much of the persuading. The lines alternate between longer and shorter, roughly four beats then three, with a lilting, skipping rhythm: "When the VOICes of CHILdren are HEARD on the GREEN." The second and fourth lines of each quatrain rhyme (hill/still, arise/skies, sleep/sheep), and the poem keeps adding internal echoes: "play" and "day" in the children's protest, "play" and "away" in the nurse's last permission. The rhymes bounce back and forth as if they too refuse to sit still.
The ending breaks the pattern in a way that matters. Quotation marks disappear, and neither nurse nor children speak: "The little ones leaped, and shouted, and laughed, / And all the hills echoed." The three verbs, strung together with "and," tumble out breathlessly, then the final line shortens and the last word goes to the landscape. The "hills" of line two return, so the poem ends where it began, with the countryside itself joining the children's voices. Even the sheep earlier add to this picture of a peaceful, looked-after place, much like the children under the nurse's eye.
The poem belongs to Blake's *Songs of Innocence*, and it gains weight when read beside the poem of the same title in his *Songs of Experience*. There a nurse hears the same children's voices on the green, but her thoughts turn to her own youth and she grows bitter, speaking of play as "wasted." Set against that, the Innocence nurse stands out as a figure who can hear the same sounds and feel joy rather than envy. The poem's quiet significance lies in that choice. It shows how adult and child can share a moment instead of one policing the other, and it does so in plain words, a few doubled syllables, and a hillside full of echoes.