What are the key features of William Blake's "A Little Girl Lost" from his Songs of Experience?

This is the contrary poem to "The Little Girl Lost" which was originally in Innocence. It may help you to use that poem as a counterpoint to this one.

William Blake's work originally intended to be read alongside his beautiful illustrations so it may also help you to understand this poem if you do look at the original illustrations Blake intended to accompany it. You should be able to find these easily enough with a quick google search!

One way of reading this poem is the that it is about sexual experience. The reference to an 'age of gold' may refer to an ideal time of innocence such as that in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. This suggests that the age of gold recurs with each new generation's innocence.

The girl's name in this poem, Ona, is perhaps suggested by analogy with Una in Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" who represetns truth but is falsely suspected of lechery.

The word "hoary" is quite a difficut one, it means white liek hoar frost and so suggests both coldness and age. Perhaps there is a touch of irony which presumably escapes the father, in the use of blossoms to suggest his whitness.

Some questions for you to think about are whether the imager of 'white' and 'winter's cold' are intended to suggest purity, sexual coldness or age? How has this little girl become lost? Has she been led astray by sexual desire or has she lost the pleasant love she once had which is now replaced with 'trembling fear'?

It is important to remember that there are no wrong answers when it comes to poetry!