Infant Sorrow by William Blake

Full Text

My mother groand! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swadling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

Overview

The counterpart to "Infant Joy" in Songs of Innocence — here birth is violent entry into a hostile world, and the infant already knows resistance and resignation.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-4

The parents groan and weep — birth is suffering for everyone. The baby "leapt" into a "dangerous world," active rather than passive. The simile "Like a fiend hid in a cloud" is startling: the infant is already perceived as potentially demonic, wrapped in flesh.

Lines 5-8

The baby struggles against the father's hands and swaddling bands — both literal restraint and metaphor for social constraint. The final couplet is devastating: the infant gives up ("thought best / To sulk"), choosing strategic submission over futile resistance.

Themes

• Birth as trauma
• Constraint and rebellion
• Loss of freedom
• Experience vs. innocence
• Social control from birth

Literary Devices

Simile

Like a fiend hid in a cloud — The newborn compared to a demon concealed in innocence — Blake suggests that society already projects danger onto the child.

Contrast with Companion Poem

Infant Sorrow vs. Infant Joy — Where "Infant Joy" is all tenderness and naming, this poem is all struggle and binding. Together they form Blake's dialectic of innocence and experience.

Assonance

Bound and weary I thought best — The heavy vowels slow the line down, enacting the exhaustion the infant feels.

Irony

I thought best / To sulk upon my mothers breast — The infant's "choice" to sulk is a calculated surrender — even comfort becomes a form of defeat.

Historical Context

Blake wrote this as the Experience counterpart to "Infant Joy." Where that poem imagines a two-day-old baby joyfully accepting its name, this one shows birth as the first encounter with a world that binds and constrains. Blake's spelling ("groand," "swadling") reflects his original engraving.