Laughing Song by William Blake
Quick answer: Laughing Song by William Blake explained: how the Songs of Innocence lyric makes a whole landscape laugh, its bounding metre, and what poets learn from it.
Blake's Laughing Song may be the most relentlessly cheerful poem in the English canon. Across three quatrains from Songs of Innocence (1789), everything laughs: the green woods, the dimpling stream, the air, the hill, the meadows, the grasshopper, three girls with sweet round mouths, and finally the painted birds in the shade. The poem ends by inviting the reader to pull up a chair and join the chorus of "Ha, Ha, He!"
It looks artless, which is the trap. Blake engraved and printed these songs himself, and their simplicity is engineered. Laughing Song is a study in how repetition, personification and metre can manufacture contagious joy, and in why innocence, in Blake, is a vision of the world rather than a lack of experience.
The poem
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
William Blake, 'Laughing Song' (1789)
What the poem says
The first stanza sets the whole landscape laughing: woods laugh with the voice of joy, the stream runs laughing by, the air laughs with our merry wit, the green hill laughs with the noise of it. Nature is not backdrop but participant, and its laughter answers human laughter, each amplifying the other.
The second stanza brings in the meadows, the grasshopper and three named girls, Mary, Susan and Emily, singing with sweet round mouths. The third sets the table: painted birds laughing in the shade, cherries and nuts spread out, and the closing invitation to come, live, be merry, and join in singing the sweet chorus. The movement is a widening circle of welcome that finally includes whoever is reading.
How it works
The metre bounds along on a largely anapestic four-beat line, rhymed in couplets, the rhythm of skipping rather than walking. Say the first stanza aloud and your voice rises and falls like the laughter it describes; the form performs the content, which is the oldest trick in the book done perfectly.
The structural device is saturation personification. One laughing brook is a pleasantry; a whole ecosystem laughing, item after item, line after line, becomes a worldview. Blake also engineers the ending carefully: after two stanzas of third-person description, the final lines swing round to direct address and an imperative, so the poem physically recruits its reader. And the onomatopoeic chorus gives the poem a refrain that children can join before they can parse a single metaphor.
Why it lasts
Within Songs of Innocence, the poem is a keystone of Blake's argument that joy is a form of perception available before, and beneath, the corruptions he would chart in Songs of Experience five years later. Read against its dark twins, the laughter gains poignancy; this is the world as it looks to the unhurt eye.
It also survives as pure performance material. Teachers use it because it works aloud with any age group, and its influence echoes in every poem since that lets a landscape feel human emotion. Few texts demonstrate the pathetic fallacy so nakedly and get away with it so completely.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the saturation technique. Take one verb of emotion, laughs, grieves, waits, and apply it to six or seven unlikely subjects in sequence. Somewhere around the fourth repetition the device stops being decoration and becomes a vision.
Steal the late turn to invitation. A poem that describes joy is pleasant; a poem that ends by demanding you join it is an event. Save your imperative for the last two lines.
What poets can take from this
- Repeat one emotional verb across many subjects until it becomes a way of seeing.
- Use anapaests and couplets when you want a poem to skip rather than walk.
- Name people; Mary, Susan and Emily are warmer than 'the children'.
- End a descriptive poem with a direct invitation to the reader.
- Trust simple diction; joy curdles under ornate vocabulary.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which a single emotion spreads through a whole place, a kitchen, a market, a valley, infecting at least six different things before it reaches a named person. End by inviting the reader in.
Questions
What is the theme of Laughing Song by William Blake?
The poem celebrates innocent, communal joy shared between people and nature. Its laughing woods, streams and hills present happiness as a way of perceiving the world, central to Blake's vision in Songs of Innocence.
What literary devices does Laughing Song use?
Its main devices are personification applied to nearly everything in the landscape, repetition of the word 'laugh', onomatopoeia in the 'Ha, Ha, He' chorus, and a bounding, largely anapestic metre rhymed in couplets.
How does Laughing Song fit into Songs of Innocence and of Experience?
It belongs to Songs of Innocence (1789), which portrays the world through an unhurt, joyful eye. Blake's later Songs of Experience (1794) offers darker counterparts, and the two books together form what he called the two contrary states of the human soul.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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