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Piping down the valleys wild, / Piping songs of pleasant glee, / On a cloud I saw a child, / And he laughing said to me:

William Blake

Source
Introduction, Songs of Innocence, 1789
Written
1789

About this quotation

These are the opening lines of Songs of Innocence. The child on the cloud asks the piper first for a song about a lamb, then to sing it again, and finally to write it down “in a book that all may read”.

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