ABSTRACT
Wordsworth's lament for the loss of the connection between nature and humankind in the later odes plays less subtly with the great and little traditions. Blake's engagement with pastoral aesthetics is more sophisticated than that offered by Wordsworth in the later odes. Blake reacts the nuances of classical pastoralism by exploiting the tensions between the sophistication of the speaker and the naive subject. He extends this dialectic to the tensions between the urban May Day, which he associates with hardship, and the rural May Day, which represents liberation. Blake casts aside the idea of the urban May Day as a temporary respite which may appease the consciences of bystanders, and preserves, in its place, the spring paradise as a spiritual aspiration for the festival's participants. It is striking that the urban May Day is tainted in several of the accounts offered by writers of the Romantic era.
