Blake’s poem Cradle Song rests upon a contradiction, a contradiction that provides a rather unsettling sentiment that will be familiar to most if not all parents. How many times has it been said of a baby sleeping or wriggling in a cradle that he or she is thinking some secret thing, that the child is really rather intelligent and that she or he knows what we are saying. The contradiction here, therefore, is that the seed of knowledge is within the child already and that, far from seeing something fanciful or sentimental, we are merely seeing what will inevitably arise whether we want it to be the case or not.
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