round a tent

[Andrew Whitehead]

I understand. But I must confess I didn't expect to find a tent in such a poem. All other words are clearly Buble images but what does the tent has to do with those images?
It looks to me like a transposition of Bible images into a modern setting.

The 'golden' is more symbolic than the tent, and the use of tent is continue the rustic metaphor produced by groves and lambs. Lambs dancing around a palace would be very incongruous.

[MrPedantic]

I would take "tent" as a Biblical reference, with the meaning tabernacle – cf. Numbers 1.1:

"And Jehovah spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt..."

Or Psalm 61:4, which the "Bible in Basic English" translates as:

"I will make your tent my resting-place for ever: I will keep myself under the cover of your wings."

The capitalisation of "His", etc., interestingly, is not Blake's own; cf. the original design for the poem.

MrP

[CHOMAT]

I felt it just like Mr P but I couldn't have expressed it better. The poem is imbued with references to The H. book. Yet It also looks as if it carried us on the brink of paganism for our greatest pleasure.

[Casiopea]

The poem is imbued with references to The H. book. Yet It also looks as if it carried us on the brink of paganism for our greatest pleasure.

Harold Bloom called the title of the peom "one of the most deliberately misleading and ironic of all Blake's lyrics."

Here's an article well worth the read: "The Little Black Boy"