First of all, let's briefly mention the trivial mechanistics of poetry, rhyme and meter. Rhyme is not absolutely essential to poetry, but if a poet is a skillful rhymist, why not show it off? Blake has certainly chosen his rhymes well in this poem.
Meter is more important. Here again, Blake exhibits great skill as a metricist, varying his metric patterns just enough to keep the reader out of the trap of a doggerel verse style of recitation.
Poetry, unlike prose, does not need to adhere rigidly to the dogmatic aspects of grammatical sentence structure, but must, instead, paint a vivid word picture. A poem must present the reader with the appropriate words placed into the order that the mind is going to need them to build the desired imagery. This, as you can see, is a matter in which Blake has excelled mightily.
Imagery is Blake's greatest strength. In the first four lines of this poem, he introduces the concept of great and incomprensible things being represented by small and understandable things. We have no idea, for instance, of the infinite magnificence of heaven, but we can easily perceive a wild flower we can hold in our hand.
So, having used the first four lines to draw your mind from images of the great to images of the small, Blake then uses the rest of the poem to go the other direction, to use the small to represent the great. An underfed dog reminds you of the failings of a great state. A wounded skylark elicits images of whatever it is that woundrous cherubims must be doing up in heaven.
I don't recall having studied anything by William Blake in school. But that's not too surprising. My most recent literature class was in my sophomore year in college in 1963. Oops, now you-all know I'm a creaky old ancient geezer and anything I write about William Blake is probably the result of Old-Timers Disease, but whatever.
Now, I realize that you-all are getting tired of this same old sky.jpg background I got from Enders Realm Graphics because I've already used it on at least two earlier Fugue projects, but I'm using it again anyhow because to me it represents dreams and dreaming, and goes well with the dreamlike essence of William Blake's poetry.
