A Visit to William Blake’s Inn

A Visit to William Blake's Inn is a short book of poems for 7 year olds by Nancy Willard, set in an inn where two dragons do the baking.

What happens

It opens with a true story. Willard was seven and in bed with measles when her babysitter recited "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright" at her. Two days later a book of Blake's poems arrived in the post, inscribed to her and signed by a man who had been dead for nearly two hundred years.

Everything after that is the inn. You arrive in Blake's Celestial Limousine, driven by somebody in a mackintosh and wings who informs you that your luggage is excessive. A rabbit shows you to your room. There is no bed. There is a shaggy bear who offers to be your pillow and promises to blow on your eyes at sunrise.

The other guests are a tiger, a King of Cats, a Wise Cow, two sunflowers and a sullen rat. The cow sleeps on a cloud and then eats it for breakfast on buttered bread. The sunflowers ask for a room with a view and promptly take root in the carpet.

The whole collection is here, front to back, and it is not long. Fewer than twenty poems, an introduction and a goodbye.

What is lovely about reading it aloud is how much of it is nonsense you can hear the sense in. "A fat mole smothered in starlight and a heavenly nine-mouse stew" is a joke a 7 year old gets instantly. The rhythms are steady and old-fashioned, so it reads beautifully at bedtime, and a child who is not following every word will still be carried along by the sound of it.

A small caveat. It has a slightly eerie streak, the way a lot of older verse does. The tailor builds his house out of bat wool and mole skin and robins' wings that he trapped, and has to move out when the creatures will not let him sleep. The sullen rat who grumbles his way through the walk on the Milky Way gets a handful of dirt while everyone else is given stars. It is more strange than upsetting, but a very literal child may want to talk about that rat afterwards.

What to read next

If poems that behave badly go down well, Where the Sidewalk Ends is the obvious next stop, with a boy who turns into a television set and a girl called Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who flatly refuses to deal with the bins.