Theme: the first stage of english romanticism

In the “introduction” of the poet tells us that
“Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud he laughing said to me:
Pipe a song about a lamb!”

The child encourages the poet to sing his songs of happy cheer, and to write them “in a book, that all may read”.
“And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear”.

So the whole spirit of the songs of Innocence is joyfulness, light-heartedness and innocence. In them Blake expresses utopian nature-philosophy. There is no contradiction, no struggle and evil is altogether nonsexist. There is only the singing of birds and the bleating of lambs, laughter and merriment:
“ … The green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
… The air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it”.
Although the true Romantic poets from Coleridge to Keats appealed to be always writing about the past, they had not in fact the solid interest in it that Walter Scott had, and that historians or archeologists have. This is an important point without which Romanticism cannot be properly understood. W. Scott wrote about the Middle Ages because he was genuinely interested in this epoch and wanted to tell stories about it. But the real Romantic poets and story-tellers all over Europe, who began to give their poems and stories a medieval background, were not so much turning to the past as deliberately turning away from the present, from the objective reality to their inner world of dream and desire, mysterious hopes and fears. In order to separate this inner world from the ordinary outer world, to make it all different, they used a kind of medieval dreamland. Their poems and talks are not really about the Middle Ages, but are concerned with their own inner selves.
The Romantics made frequent use of rather vague medieval settings just because the Middle Ages of their imagination seemed to them simpler yet more picturesque and, what is more important, they seemed more magical. Any setting that was strange, remote in time or space, served this purpose. Thus, Shelley and Keats turned to Greek mythology, giving a new significance to ancient figures of legends. Byron made use of the people and landscapes of what we now call Near and Middle East. Wordsworth made his home in the north of England in the heart of the Lake District at that time not often visited and not easily accessible.
The same “strangeness”, originally, mystery concerns female characters in Romanticism – they must be strange and mystical. Thus, Romantic love poetry is filled with mysterious beings – nymphs, water sprites, oriental queens and princesses, savage gypsy girls – in fact, with any beautiful feminine creature who couldn’t possibly live next door.