A Dream (Blake poem)

The two collections were published together under the title Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the "two contrary states of the human soul.” [2] Once a dream did weave a shade, O'er my Angel-guarded bed, That an Emmet lost it's way Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled wilderd and forlorn Dark benighted travel-worn, Over many a tangled spray All heart-broke I heard her say.

Also, the concept of guidance and protection appears through the text in different forms, as a means to return to a lost innocence.

According to Dike, this introduces the theme that everyone is imperfect and needs help because the emmet requires the assistance of the narrator's sympathy, the glow-worm's rescue, and the beetle's guidance.

However, as Linkin writes, in "A Dream" the "inversion of a popular narrative of idealized maternity pointedly suggests that the domestic ideology is nothing more than a fantasy of Generation.

According to Linkin, Blake "attends to the problematic institution of a domestic ideology that restructures the middle-class family.