An Interpretation of "Verses for an Album"

Lamb begins the poem by describing his soul as “an Album bright” (3), setting the tone for the rest of the work. His soul began as a “spotless leaf” (4) but his interactions with other people have “‘written strange defeature’ there” (6). It has become deformed by interactions with people. Time, “with heaviest hand of all” (7), has also altered his soul and imprinted “sad dates” (9) upon it. “Error, gilding worst designs” (10) has also had an effect on his life, “betray[ing] his path by crooked lines” (12). The poem continues in this manner: listing all of the things that have influenced the narrator’s soul: “vice” (13), “remorse” (16), and other assorted things in the penultimate stanza: “huge reams of folly – shreds of wit” (20). The narrator, having seen the scarring of this “spotless leaf,” no longer wants to look upon this book of his life, closing it in the end.

“Verses for an Album” uses the title in two ways: one is to describe the poem itself, which is a verse that goes inside an album, a larger collection of work. The other way is to analogize the narrator’s life, or more correctly, his soul, to the verses of an album. Over time, however, the ink becomes blurred and the pages – his soul – are no longer spotless. Every stanza discusses how the narrator’s soul deforms over time and through his own agency and the agency of the people he meets. Yet, each stanza – which deals with a separate influence – contains writing terminology, to remind us that the poem is also about poetry, not just a soul. “Leaf” in the second stanza, “writing” in the second one, “crooked lines” in the third, “blot” in the fourth, “trace” in the fifth, “reams” in the sixth. All of these words have to do with writing or the media of writing (“reams” and “leaf” refer to paper).

Most notable here is how much Lamb emphasizes experience over anything else. He sees the soul as inherently good from birth, and only through experience does it become tarnished; it is experience that makes us what we are. Lamb may be drawing his ideas from John Locke, who wrote, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, "Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer one word, From Experience." But is this experience necessarily bad? The beginning had him describe a “spotless leaf,” and what good is a piece of paper with nothing on it to a book? Blank paper defeats the purpose of writing at all; thus, the tarnishing of the paper – so, too, with the soul – is an evil, but it is a necessary evil. For the album to exist at all, it must have verses written upon its pages. For life to having any purpose, it must be filled with experience, which Lamb emphasizes is not always a good thing.