“NURSE’S SONG” BY WILLIAM BLAKE: FROM CLASSICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE POEM TO A COGNITIVE MODEL OF THE WORLD OF INNOCENCE IN THE POETIC TEXT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/folium/2026.8.1Keywords:
William Blake, Nurse’s Song, critical interpretation, cognitive poetics, frame, conceptual metaphor, image schema.Abstract
The article presents an in-depth analysis of William Blake’s poem “Nurse’s Song” from Songs of Innocence through the lens of an integrated approach that combines classical literary criticism with contemporary cognitive poetics. The relevance of the study lies in the need to interpret Blake’s work not merely as a constellation of symbols, but as a coherent system of cognitive organization of human experience. The study synthesizes and systematizes scholarly interpretations that highlight the lexical, acoustic, grammatical, and communicative dimensions of the poem. The research states that traditional approaches do not reveal the underlying mental structures that constitute the coherence of the poetic world of Innocence. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the frame-based, metaphorical, and image-schematic structures that ensure coherence between children’s play, the nurse’s perspective, and the harmonized landscape. The methodological framework integrates frame analysis, conceptual metaphor theory, and image schema analysis. As a result, a hierarchy of frames is identified: central frames (“play”, “care”) and peripheral ones (“persuasion and trust”, “temporal boundary”, “inner peace”, “community”). The research demonstrates that these structures normalize children’s activity and model communication as a process grounded in mutual trust rather than hierarchical coercion. Particular attention is focused on the system of conceptual metaphors that structure abstract categories in terms of embodied sensory experience. The analysis of image schemas reveals the pre-rational foundation of the poetic world, in which Innocence emerges as a dynamically balanced mode of experiencing reality. The study concludes that “Nurse’s Song” represents the model of the world of Innocence not as naivety, but as a distinctive cognitive regime capable of accommodating awareness of danger while preserving openness to the joy of the present moment.
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