A child asks a lamb a question the lamb cannot possibly answer, then answers it himself. That small scene is the whole shape of Blake's "The Lamb." The first stanza is a question and the second is a reply. The poem moves from wondering to certainty, and it never doubts the answer it reaches.
The question arrives wrapped in gifts. After "Little Lamb, who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee," the sentence runs on without a break for eight lines, each clause adding another present: "Gave thee life," "Gave thee clothing of delight," "Gave thee such a tender voice." The repeated "gave" makes creation sound like generosity rather than engineering. The details are chosen for comfort. The lamb is told to feed "by the stream and o'er the mead," so food and water are already provided. Its wool is "softest clothing, woolly, bright," three adjectives that appeal to touch and sight at once. Calling the fleece "clothing of delight" suggests that even a coat is a pleasure and not just a covering. Then comes sound: the lamb's "tender voice" makes "all the vales rejoice," as though the landscape answers its small cry.
The form helps this gentleness. The lines are short, mostly seven syllables, and the stresses fall on the opening beats: GAVE thee LIFE, and BID thee FEED. That falling rhythm is close to a nursery rhyme or lullaby. The rhymes are simple couplets (feed/mead, delight/bright, voice/rejoice), and the repeated "Little Lamb" opens six lines in all. The repetition sounds like a child talking to a pet, but it also works like a chant. The line "who made thee" appears at the start and end of the first stanza, so the question frames everything between.
The second stanza begins "Little Lamb, I'll tell thee," said twice, as if the speaker can hardly wait. The answer is a riddle solved by a pun on names: the maker "is called by thy name, / For He calls Himself a Lamb." The next lines, "meek," "mild," and "He became a little child," point to the Christian idea of God taking human form, and to the lamb as a sacred image. The poem does not name Christ, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the chain of likeness it builds. The speaker says "I a child, and thou a lamb," and the pronouns, which were "thee" and "thy" in the first stanza, now stand side by side as "I" and "thou" before merging into "We." The rhyme words *name* and *Lamb* are paired in line after line. They don't rhyme perfectly, but the repetition locks them together, and the creator, the animal and the child end up sharing a single name.
The ending changes the poem's purpose. A question that began as "who made thee?" finishes as "God bless thee!", repeated like the earlier refrain. The speaker does not argue or prove anything. He blesses. Knowledge becomes tenderness, and the creator turns out to be as small and gentle as the creature he made.
The poem matters partly because of how much it holds in such plain words. Almost nothing in it is difficult, yet it sets out a whole view of the world as a gift, with a maker who shares the vulnerability of what he makes. It also belongs to Blake's *Songs of Innocence*, and part of its meaning comes from that setting. Its counterpart, "The Tyger," in *Songs of Experience*, asks, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Read beside that line, the child's perfect confidence starts to look like one way of seeing the world rather than the only one. That is an inference from the pairing, but the two poems do seem built to face each other. "The Lamb" is complete and consoling by itself. Its calm leaves a reader wondering what a more troubled voice would ask, and that gives the poem a depth its simple surface hides.