ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

 

 This poem seems on the surface to be about a black boy who is telling what his mother explained one day to him under a tree. He shows his proud of have a white soul, in spite of be black, on the contrary of the English child, who is completely white.

The little black boy shows to us, under his innocence, his anxiety of being loved by the white boy. He wants to be like him.

God is present in the entire poem, probably because the question of religion was very important for the poet. (“Look on the rising sun! there God does live”).

Some of the characteristics of the poem are those:

 The voice of the poem: the little black boy is who is telling the story. In this case, the poet is identified with the black boy.

Another important and outstanding thing is that is obviously a big contrast between whiteness and blackness. Blake establishes very clear difference between both. He combines black and white. Is a metaphoric representation between good and bad. Black is evil, white is angel.

The colour black is the main issue in the poem (it is constantly repeated along it). He, the protagonist, the little boy, is black; and as he is black, he seems that he hasn’t been accepted by God.

 

 At a deeper level or analysis, we can catch on what the poet shows to us (under the appearance of a simple poem about a little black boy). He shows more things about two important aspects: race and religion.

And if we pay attention, we can take out of the poem how William Blake describes two things, as the soul and the body.

Step by step:

In the first paragraph:

“and I am black, but O! my soul is white”

“… I am black as if bereav’d of light.”

 

In the fourth paragraph :

“And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face

Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.”

 

In the fifth paragraph:

“For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear

The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice,”

 

In the sixth paragraph:

“When I from black and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:”

 

In the last paragraph:

“And be like him and he will then love me.”

 

We can make an interpretation of these words, like this:

We have here the soul and the body.

Clearly, the body of this boy is black, but his soul is white. What does it mean?

The boy shows the colour of his body as a failure, when he says: “…I am black, but O! my soul is white”  

So, the white colour must represent something good, while the black colour (his defect) is something about which he is not proud, because is something bad. He wants to say that in spite of his black colour, in spite of his bad thing, he is really good, that is to say, his soul is good = white.

 

The mother of the boy defines their bodies “like a shady grove”, so, we go on stating that the black body is bad.

 “And be like him and he will then love me”. What does it mean now?

He refers to the white boy, the “good” boy. We can understand with this that the white boy doesn’t love now the black boy. So, (as we can now about the racial relations in this time) white people do not love black people, but these black people have the hope that some day they could be equals. They hope equality in heaven. That is what the mother wants to explain to her son.

At the end, the boy is represented as a white boy; perhaps to make understand that he has became a “good boy”. The angel that he has is white.

 

Another important thing in the poem is the question of the nature, the way the poem is presented, the place where the action takes place, the image of being under the tree. This is always very important for William Blake, because is part of one of the essential characteristics of the romantic poems of the society.

Nature includes the society. The romantic (the period in which the poem is written by Blake) was concerned about the place that the individual occupies in the world.

 The clearest metaphor of Blake: the sun represents the light, God. Bad things occur in the darkness (evil vs. angel), and heats represents love.

For Blake, nature represents all (combination of flowers, trees, animals…that need the light of God to survive).

But personally I think that here there is a contradictory symbolism, specifically the indeterminacy of the meanings of the black and white imagery.

In accordance with the running metaphor of the sun, the fact that Blake speaks of "black bodies" and a "sunburnt face" in the fourth paragraph seems to imply that black people are closer to God as a result of their suffering – for one can only become dark and sunburned as a result of being exposed to the sun's rays.

 And in the last paragraph, when the boy says that he will "shade him [the English boy] from the heat", this implies that the English boy's pale skin is not used to the heat (derived from God's love). Maybe, I think, the paleness of the English boy in this poem is symbolic of the fact that the English were distanced from God as a result of their treatment of the black peoples.

In the 6^th paragraph, Blake uses a metaphor: “When I from black and he from white cloud are free”.  Here, Blake uses the clouds as a metaphor for the human body. These paragraphs as therefore imply that after physical life has passed, all will be united with God.

Just as the two poems “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” together ask the question, could the same good loving God who would create a lamb also create a tiger (with the answer being, of course, yes), this poem also deals with the Problem of Evil.  The boy speaks from innocence and is comforted by his answer to his question, that there is a reason God gave the black boy a harder lot in life, that he has a mission to shade the English boy from the harsh rays of the sun.