IACOB ELENA

AN II, IDD FOCSANI

ROMANA-ENGLEZA

THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

William Blake (1757-1827), English artist, mystic and poet wrote Songs of Innocence
(1789): a poetry collection written from the child’s point of view, of innocent wonderment and
spontaneity in natural settings which includes “Little Boy Lost”, “Little Boy Found”, “The
Lamb”, “Little Black Boy”.

In the poem “Little Black Boy” , Black speack about soul and body. That radical aspect is not
immediately apparent, as the opening lines seemingly fall into the depressingly familiar duality
of black as unclean and white as pure :

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but oh! my soul is white.

The “English child” is “white as an angel”, and the black child appears “bereaved of
light”, these are illusions that result from viewing the body as something distinct from the soul
and giving it any material weight. Far from endorsing the idea that white is superior to black,
The little black boy learns this wisdom from his mother, as she points to the East and identifies
the sun as the place where God lives. This is a further indication that Blake does not view the
material as something distinct from the spiritual- the light of the sun is literally the light of God,
a gift that gives comfort to all creatures in the natural world.

Blake writes of transcending the illusion of materiality and recognizing our fundamental
equality :

And we are put on earth a little space

That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

This idea is further developed in the next stanza, where the child’s mother tells him that
all shall abandon these illusory forms and gather around the tent of God once they have learned
to bear the heat of his sunbeams.
The final stanzas find the little black boy reflecting on what his mother has told him, and
contemplating what will happen when he and the white English boy have transcended their
physical frames. Blake reinforces the idea that the two are equal in the line “When I from black,
and he from white cloud free”, a direct statement that all physical bodies are equally illusory.
Interestingly, it’s the black boy who assists the white boy in bearing the heat of the sun’s rays,
and Blake’s final lines suggest that this show of strength is what ultimately breaks down the
artificial barriers between the two.