Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, June 23, 2025.

Today's poem, in a kind of continuation of last week's theme, is by William Blake,

the proto-romantic, working and writing a generation before the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge,

but very much already concerned with some of the same themes as we'll see in today's poem and tomorrows,

including the alienation of man from nature because of certain modern preoccupations.

But Blake also stands in a class of his own as this prophetic, apocalyptic character.

Someone like Wordsworth can write a poem about the beauties of nature and it seem

very benign. I don't know that Blake is capable of writing a benign poem. Everything he writes

seems to carry this momentousness, including today's poem, which is the introduction to his

collection Songs of Experience, which is meant to be

the companion piece to Songs of Innocence. In the introduction to that collection,

the poet talks of piping down the valleys and meeting a young boy who requests a song about a

lamb, and then the poet begins to compose songs that

every child may hear and enjoy. Contrast that with this poem, the introduction to songs of

experience, which opens with an invocation of a prophetic, a mosaic voice, also an epic Homeric one, the voice of the bard

who sees present, past, and future. And then unlike the introduction to Songs of Innocence,

which is going to kick off then a stream of lighthearted verses, this introduction is going to initiate a thematically

heavy dialogue with the earth itself, which will be the subject of tomorrow's poem.

So to begin, here is William Blake's introduction to Songs of Experience.

Hear the Voice of the bard, who present past and future sees,

whose ears have heard the holy word that walked among the ancient trees,

...