THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

by: William Blake (1757-1827)

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O, my soul is white!

White as an angel is the English child,

But I am black, as if bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree,

And, sitting down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissed me,

And, pointing to the East, began to say:

'Look at the rising sun: there God does live,

And gives His light, and gives His heat away,

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

'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

Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

'For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,

The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,

Saying, "Come out from the grove, my love and care,

And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice."'

Thus did my mother say, and kissed me,

And thus I say to little English boy.

When I from black and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear

To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;

And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him, and he will then love me.

(Poem extracted from http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/the_little_black_boy.html)

“The Little Black Boy” is a poem by the English poet and painter William Blake and was published in Songs of Innocence, a work included among his so-called “Illuminated Books”, in 1789. As we know, his poetry was mainly for children in a way in which many of his poems are about children or are seen from the perspective of a child. We can tell this in “The Little Black Boy” and in the majority of poems included in Songs of Innocence in which Blake focuses on the inhuman treatment that infants received when they were forced to work under very hard conditions, as we can tell in “The Chimney Sweeper”, or simply for the color of the skin. “At first reading, the Songs have affinities with eighteenth-century children’s literature but go beyond the traditional children’s book to question some of the unexamined assumptions of adult society” states The William Blake Archive website.

“Illuminated Printing and Other Illuminated Books” The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 22 Dec 2007 http://www.blakearchive.org/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=/blake/documents/biography.xml&style=blake/shared/styles/wba.xsl&targ_div=d3&targ_pict=1&render=text&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes>.

The poem is divided into six stanzas, each one forming a quatrain, and using the iambic pentameter, which means lines of five metrical feet of unstressed and stressed syllables. Almost all the lines have 10 syllables. The rhyme pattern used is ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH IJIJ CKCK ICIC. The way you read the poem and its rhyme makes you be able to read it as if it were a song, as it happens with many of Blake’s poems. In fact some poems have been arranged nowadays to be a song. The poem is written in first person singular but it is not the author who speaks but a little black boy and from 3^rd to 5^th stanza the boy states what his mother once told him, as if he was his mother in person.

In the first stanza Blake shows us a little black boy who was born in “the southern wild”, meaning Africa. First of all he says that even though his skin is black his soul is white as the one of an English child. In the second stanza the boy only introduces what his mother told him and we see it from the third stanza to the fifth. He explains that his mother told him where God lives, in “the East, at the rising Sun”. His mother also says that God gives us light, comfort and joy, and that his black skin does not matter to God, it is “a cloud that will vanish” when we learn to respect and accept one to each other, meaning “when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear”. In the sixth stanza the black boy says then to an English white child that the color of the skin is “like a cloud”. Afterwards, in the seventh stanza, he tells to the white boy that when they both are dead and gone to Heaven “round my golden tent”, he will protect him from God’s heat until he learns to understand God’s love. Then they will be regarded the same, but not actually the same. What Blake says is that then the black boy will be like the white one. This may induce to think that racial quality at that time had not the same values it has nowadays. Anyway Blake shows us a black boy who tells to the English boy that they are equals but in this world not everyone thinks the same and that can only be eradicated when they are in Heaven with God. Later on the black boy idealizes himself protecting or shading the white boy from God’s love until he gets used to it showing that the black boy is already used. He is better prepared for God’s love and life in Heaven than the white boy whose skin is not already used to God’s heat, which means God’s love. This is what his mother told him; after suffering or being humiliated in the Earth you will get the reward of harmony in Heaven. The poem itself implies a renunciation of oppression and racism by William Blake himself.

There are many opposite contrasts in the poem such as black and white, death and life, Earth and Heaven or, in a certain way, golden and silver. As we can see, “Blake plays around with the traditional associations between 'white' and 'good', but also, in the little black boy's views on Soul/Body, makes the point that colour is skin deep, but colour is no indication of spiritual state” <http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/the_lit2.htm >. We also find many similes in the poem as in the first stanza “White as an angel…” and “I am black, as if bereaved of light” or in the last line of the sixth stanza when the black boy says “And round the tent of God like lambs we joy”. Blake makes use of metaphors too throughout the poem and here we can see some of them and their possible meaning: When the black boy refers to “the southern wild” he refers to Africa, as we stated before. We also find in the sixth line “before the heat of the day”, which means the dawn, and at the beginning of the third quatrain we can read “at the rising sun” which makes reference to the Kingdom of God or the Heaven. Moreover the poem is filled with many symbolisms like the “heat”. This word appears three times in the poem as we see when the black boy says that God “gives His light, and gives His heat away”, in this sense “heat” could mean love” because four lines beneath we read “we may learn to bear the beams of love” and we all know that the beams of the sun (where God lives) produce heat. Another symbolism we find is in his mother, presented as a tender and mild person who seems to teach her son to assimilate what he is and to understand that despite the color of his skin he deserves the same love that any white person can deserve. She looks a person who fights to make his son gain his self-esteem and to know the comfort of God. She explains to his child that earthly life is only a kind of preparation for the life in Heaven, that the color of the skin is something relevant in Earth but not in Heaven where all are the same. We can relate this humble mother to Blake’s mother with whom he was very affectionate, and all the religious symbolism of God could also be related to Blake’s faith even though he was also critic with some aspects of the religion.

“The Little Black Boy”, published as we said in Songs of Innocence, was one of the earliest publications by the author but anyway we can notice some of his thinking steeped in his works. He wanted all the people to be equal and was against slavery and racism. As he said in one of his seven principles “all men are alike with the same infinite variety”, this means that it does not matter if you are white, yellow or black, we all are human beings. Very few years before writing this poem William Blake already used to meet revolutionary people such as Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, John Henry Fuseli and Mary Wollstonecraft among others, "William Blake." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 28 Nov 2007, 15:55 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 29 Nov 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Blake&oldid=174389117>.

Then we know that Blake was an activist who held very progressive ideas at those times that were based on the suppression of slavery that was still in force in many countries worldwide. He also was in favor of the women’s rights and freedom and put his faith in the success of the French Revolution, he even used to wear “a red liberty cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries” "William Blake." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 28 Nov 2007, 15:55 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 29 Nov 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Blake&oldid=174389117>.

This is quite clearly reflected on the poem, apart from the childlike appearance of the poem it hides a political meaning in which he prays for the abolition of slavery. Maybe the fact that he and his wife were not able to have a baby shows us his interest in writing children-poems and warn the people of all the miseries and unfairness that children suffered, so I think this poem must have been rather relevant for the author. It is his anti-racist and progressive mind what induces me to think so. This is a poem that can still be used nowadays for claiming the rejection to any kind of racism that still nowadays lurks in most of the Western countries, Spain included, of course, because in spite of the time that has went by since it was wrote, that problem is not solved yet. Furthermore the children’s exploitation which Blake echoed in many of his poems is a problem today so it seems that nothing has changed since then. Blake poems can really make you think of the past but also of the present because in spite of his efforts racism is still a thing which we cannot get rid of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

"William Blake." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 28 Nov 2007, 15:55 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 29 Nov 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Blake&oldid=174389117>.

http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/the_little_black_boy.html

“The Little Black Boy: Notes”. 22 Dec 2007 http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/the_lit2.htm

“Youth and Apprenticeship, 1757-1778” The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi.. 22 Dec 2007, <http://www.blakearchive.org/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=blake/documents/biography.xml&style=blake/shared/styles/wba.xsl>

“Illuminated Printing and Other Illustrated Books, 1789-1792” The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 22 Dec 2007, <http://www.blakearchive.org/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=/blake/documents/biography.xml&style=blake/shared/styles/wba.xsl&targ_div=d3&targ_pict=1&render=text&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes>