From Songs of Experience, published 1794, this was one of the series of poems which explore the harsh realities of late 18th and early 19th Century life during the time of King George III, known — ironically given the terrible social conditions of the time — as the Romantic Era. Most of the poems in the “Songs of Experience” category are matched by an idealistic portrayal in Songs of Innocence. The contrast is Blake’s method of social protest.

The institution of marriage was, to Blake’s mind, a tool of organized religion, a societal construct and therefore an impediment to true human nature. It looks forward to a future perfect world, and can therefore be described as thematically eschatological, that is concerned with ultimate spiritual resolution. So the innocent, natural love of the two young people is the real, ultimate Love. In the poem the girl’s father, trapped as he was in his archaic conservatism, cannot accept this truth.

The title of the poem is significant. Although the girl is past adolescence and sexualised, she is essentially innocent and hence ‘little’.

In setting the poem in a future time Blake was able to create distance, a perspective showed the present societal standards to be repressive and misguided. He then tells the story, now based in the past, an ‘age of gold’, in which young lovers could be free, when nakedness was no sin, and conventions didn’t exist to stifle open expressions of innocent love. The freedom recalls the Arcadia) of Greek mythology and the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

This poem should be read in conjunction with The Little Girl Found. Both deal with the themes of parental authority, the trials of the physical world and salvation promised in the future life.

Structure
The poem comprises seven quintains, that is five-lined stanzas, of which there are seven. The rhyme scheme is broadly an AABBB pattern, although this varies, for example in stanza five the pattern is AAAAA. Some rhyme is consonant, as in stanza four, ‘afar’ and ‘near’. The last line of each stanza is longer than the rest, breaking up the regularity of the pattern, giving emphasis to the significance of the meaning.

Language and Imagery
The opening is in the form of a prologue, the voice that of a third person speaker, probably the poet. He describes the progress of the affair between the young lovers in simple terms, the distance of the ‘future age’ allowing critical detachment. Blake uses metaphor, for example, ‘age of gold’ and ‘winter’s cold’ represent freedom and its opposite, repression and stultifying convention.