In “The Schoolboy,” Blake compares a little boy forced to go to school to a caged bird as well as to a bud or blossom that has been nipped. The poem contrasts the life of a child who is free and happy in nature with that of a child forced to toil in a dreary schoolroom. If a boy is indeed a bird or a blossom, he will thrive only if he is allowed to fly free and drink in the sun’s rays.

 The poet expresses it this way:

How can the bird that is born for joy /Sit in a cage and sing? How can a child, when fears annoy, /But droop his tender wing …

 In the above stanza, the school boy is a bird, frightened by the schoolroom. Below he is a bud who will no thrive in the classroom:

 O father and mother if buds are nipped,/And blossoms blown away…

 This typically Romantic poem ends on a note of warning: the child deprived of his chance to run freely will not develop “summer fruits” and won’t have the resources to withstand the winter (the hard times in life). Blake depicts his imagined child as a pure and innocent creation who will be ruined, not improved, by the unnatural constraints of civilization. Nature, the narrator argues, is the best teacher of the young birds or buds.