John Tavener and William Blake: Two Mystics Team Up to Produce a Masterpiece

I have been privileged to sing John Tavener’s “The Lamb” twice with the Cherry Creek Chorale here in the Denver area. It’s interesting for me to look back on that first performance in 2013 and to realize how little I understood the piece’s complexities. Our 2021 concert gave me a chance to dig a little deeper.

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 who claimed to have had visions starting in early childhood; he 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:

We will assume, to begin with, that the poem is addressing a literal lamb, albeit that it’s asking a rhetorical/metaphorical question, phrased as two almost-identical lines:

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Then the lamb’s creation is spelled out: He’s a living creature, needing water and food provided by stream and meadow:

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;

The lamb has soft fleece to clothe him, and he has a sweet, tender voice that makes the valleys ring with joy. Does that image make sense to you? The bleating of lambs might not seem terribly attractive to us city folks, but then we’ve never been shepherds. Blake wasn’t one either, but he’d have been aware of the tremendous importance of lambing season in England. If your whole livelihood depends on those lambs’ being born and then surviving, their bleating would indeed be a cause of rejoicing:

Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!

The verse ends with a repetition of the opening lines.

On to verse two, where Blake moves into spiritual and symbolic meaning, answering his own questions. So the creator of the literal lamb is someone who calls himself a Lamb, a person who can only be Jesus. Layers of meaning can be seen here, and I could go on at some length about them, but I will confine myself to a couple of references. The Christian New Testament has John the Baptist say as he sees Jesus approaching, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29 KJV) The Book of Revelation, at the end of the New Testament, refers to Christ as a triumphant Lamb many times, perhaps the most familiar being the verse quoted in Handel’s Messiah: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood.” (5:12 KJV)

He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,

As for this whole “meek and mild” description of Jesus, well, I wish people would quit using that terminology. Yes, it’s true that we’re told that “A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench,” but the verse goes on to say, “till he send forth judgment unto victory.” (Matthew 12:20 KJV) In other words, any gentleness Jesus displays toward the weak is out of choice, and he’s perfectly capable of carrying out discipline and judgment. The Jesus of the Gospels and of Revelation told people off frequently and, indeed, sometimes used physical force. Remember, Jesus made a whip out of cords and drove out the moneychangers (those who “changed” worshipers’ regular money into “temple” money, usually cheating them in the process) from the temple at Jerusalem. Blake might have been echoing Charles Wesley, the great English preacher who wrote the hymn “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild.” All I can say is, Blake knew better than that, and so did Wesley!

Okay, enough ranting. Now to the one line in the poem that refers to the birth of Christ and therefore to Christmas:

He became a little child.

Blake then sums up the significance of the lamb:

I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.

Israel in the Old Testament/Jewish Bible and followers of Jesus in the Christian New Testament are constantly called “sheep”–“We are his people and the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100:3 KJV) and “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.” (John 10:14 KJV) The literal lamb reminds Blake that he himself is a spiritual lamb. So a beautiful circularity of ideas is developed: the literal lamb–>the Lamb of God –>the holy Child–>his human lambs–>the literal lamb. Because of how the lamb reminds Blake of these truths, he ends with:

Little Lamb God bless thee!
Little Lamb God bless thee!

Blake apparently wanted his Songs to be sung, not read, but his original melody is now lost. Ralph Vaughn Williams and Allen Ginsberg(!) both composed music for the poem, as did many others. But the most famous setting is the one I mentioned at the beginning of this post, John Tavener, who said of his 1982 composition that “‘The Lamb’ came to me fully grown and was written in an afternoon and dedicated to my nephew Simon for his 3rd birthday.” The piece has enjoyed great success, which it certainly deserves. Tavener was a fascinating character, much like Blake in his spirituality. If you’re interested in reading more about him, be sure to read my post about his “Song for Athene.”

Here’s a lovely performance of  Tavener’s setting–I’m a sucker for boy sopranos, so that’s why I chose this one:

I don’t go in for musical analysis on this blog because I’m totally unqualified to do any. But the director of my community choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, pointed us to this fascinating video that shows how musically sophisticated Tavener’s piece is even though it seems so simple–just like Blake’s poem. (Note, please, that low-low A from the basses in the final measure!)