Poem 11, "When We Come Home, Blake Calls for Fire" Summary

Blake opens this short three-stanza poem with an apostrophe, a request directly made to "Fire." The request continues throughout the entire poem. This poem is in ballad form but has AABB for a rhyme scheme and iambic scansion. Each stanza begins with a capital letter except for the last one, since the last line of the preceding stanza is an enjambment carrying over to the last stanza. The second line does begin with a capital.

In the first stanza, Blake calls the fire a "handsome creature" and asks him to shine. He requests that the hearth, the place where the fire is made, become a warm home that warms everyone. He acknowledges in lines two and three that he has confined the fire with its...