I was privileged to sing Tavener’s “The Lamb” in which he sets a poem by William Blake to music back in 2013, when it was all I could do to get through it in one piece. My idea of how much work it takes to learn such a deceptively simple piece was, shall we say, sketchy. Now, as I write this post in the fall of 2021, I’m totally struck with its otherworldly beauty and want to sing it perfectly.
Let’s start with the author of the text, William Blake. If you remember your English literature class, you’ll know that he was an early Romantic mystic. He claimed to have had visions from age four onwards and was actually more interested in his art than his poetry. He and his wife put out an illustrated edition of some of his poems, with a few initial copies including his own hand-colored engravings. “The Lamb” is from his poetry collection Songs of Innocence. It seems like a simple little ditty, almost a child’s poem, until you look at it closely, which I will now proceed to do. Here’s my own line-by-line analysis: