Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold,
But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in Heaven will never do well.
But if at the church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the church to stray.
Then the parson might preach, and drink, and sing,
And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring;
And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.
And God, like a father rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel,
But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.
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More Poems by William Blake
• A Divine Image
• A Dream
• A Little Boy Lost
• A Little Girl Lost
• A Poison Tree
• Auguries Of Innocence
• Earth's Answer
• Holy Thursday
• Human Abstract
• I Heard An Angel
• Infant Joy
• Infant Sorrow
• Jerusalem
• Laughing Song
• London
• Love's Secret
• Mad Song
• My Pretty Rose Tree
• Night
• Nurse's Song
• On Another's Sorrow
• Preludium To America
• The Blossom
• The Chimney Sweeper
• The Fly
• The Garden Of Love
• The Grey Monk
• The Lamb
• The Land Of Dreams
• The Lily
• The Little Black Boy
• The Little Vagabond
• The Question Answered
• The Sick Rose
• The Tiger
• The Wild Flower's Song
Also read poems by
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• John Keats
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Frost
• Robert Browning
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Butler Yeats
• William Wordsworth
William Blake The Little Vagabond - Poem Lyrics - William Blake - The Little Vagabond
