Four lines are enough for William Blake to stage a small contest between flowers, and the result is lopsided. The rose and the sheep, the poem says, are not what they seem. The rose is "modest" and the sheep "humble," yet one "puts forth a thorn" and the other carries "a threat'ning horn." The Lily alone is free of defences. She "shall in love delight," and her beauty is unspoiled by "a thorn" or "a threat." The central idea is a contrast between two kinds of virtue: one that guards itself with weapons, and one that is open, trusting and entirely given over to love.
The first couplet depends on a gap between words and facts. "Modest" and "humble" are praise-words, the kind we use for people who ask for nothing. But each is followed at once by a weapon. Even the verb is slightly sly. "Puts forth" is what a plant does with a bud or a new leaf, so the rose's thorn is described as if it were an act of blossoming. The sheep is meant to be the most harmless of animals, yet it gets a horn, and Blake makes the point sharper by choosing "threat'ning," squeezed into two syllables by its apostrophe. The poem suggests that gentleness on the surface can sit very comfortably with a readiness to wound.
The colon at the end of line two works as a hinge, and "While" swings the poem round to the lily. The sound of the verse changes with it. The first two lines are brisk and compact, eight syllables each, in a steady iambic beat: "The HUM-ble SHEEP a THREAT-'ning HORN." The last two stretch out to ten syllables and take on a lighter, skipping movement, closer to a dance: "Nor a THORN nor a THREAT stain her BEAU-ty bright." The reader can feel the poem relax. The rhymes are simple couplets, *thorn/horn* and *delight/bright*, and they reinforce the split. The first pair of rhyme words is hard and defensive. The second is full of light. The poem even sounds like the thing it describes, tight and bristling at first, then open.
The vocabulary of the lily's lines is soft and bright: "white," "love," "delight," "beauty bright." White suggests purity, while the repeated long *i* of *white*, *delight* and *bright* gives the ending a glow. The word "shall" is also worth noticing. Blake does not say the lily *does* delight in love but that she *shall*, which makes it sound like a promise, or even a law of her nature.
There is a subtler twist in the final line, though. The lily is defined partly by absence: "Nor a thorn nor a threat." The word "thorn" comes back, and so does the sound of "threat," with its echoing *th* in "thorn." The weapons are named again even as they are denied, so the lily's innocence is described against the background of everything that might harm it. The word "stain" belongs to the language of moral corruption, which hints that thorns and threats are not just physical but a kind of damage to the spirit. Whether the lily is simply admirable, or perhaps a little too good to be true, is something the poem leaves for the reader to decide. Some readers take it as a celebration of love without fear or shame, and others as a pointed comment on a world where politeness and holiness so often come armed.
The poem appears in *Songs of Experience*, where Blake generally looks harder at the gap between appearance and reality than in his gentler songs. Even in such a tiny space, "The Lily" shows his gift for compression: three living things, one moral contrast, and a rhythm that changes mood halfway through. Its significance lies in how much it asks of a few plain words. A reader leaves wondering which flower they would rather be, and how many of the "modest" and "humble" people around them might secretly have thorns.