Poesía inglesa de los siglos XIX y XX    

The Little Black Boy, by William Blake

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy AA, 1826. The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Josheph Viscomi. 13 November 2006 <http://www.blakearchive.org>

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh 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, pointed to the east, began to say:

"Look on 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
Is 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.

ANALYSIS

The intention of this essay is mainly focused to highlight and consider the main issues dealt in the poem from the religion point of view:  

- Opposition between the ideas of black and white, devil and good.

- The idea of equality upon the God’s eyes.

- The idea of heat as God and the bodies as clouds obstructing the light of God.

- The difficulty of bearing the light of god’s countenance (Genesis).[i]

The Little Black boy, from Songs of Innocence (1789) and from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), was composed by William Blake and written in seven heroic quatrains, seven stanzas of pentameter lines rhyming abab.

The argument takes the form of a biographical narration of a black boy and how he got to understand  his mother’s view of overcoming the human inequality condition through religion’s relieve. He was born in “the southern wild” (line 01), although he is a black child his soul is as white as an English child. His mother introduces him into the meaning of God’s words teaching him that every single living creature, despite his or her race or its condition, are equal to God’s eyes. His mother compares him to a cloud and after “our souls have learn’d the heat to bear, the cloud will vanish”  every creature will live under God’s tent as equal. The little black boy then learns the lesson and addresses the white English child saying that he will “shade him from the heat” until the English boy learns to bear the love of God and love him “upon our Father’s knee”.

The speaker “I” in the poem is already identified at the very beginning of the poem, since the tittle is The Little Black Boy and he already introduces himself as black in the first stanza “And I am black…” (line 02).

Regarding the title “The Little Black Boy”, William Blake introduces the main theme of the poem: that story of the black boy. As we are going to see, the word “black” is going to be repeated throughout the whole poem (lines 2-4-15-24) and each time it appears, it is contrasted or compared with another idea: “And I am black, but O! my soul is white” / “But I am black as if bereav'd of light” / “And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face” / “When I from black and he from white cloud free”. All these repetitions lead us to understand the importance of this word. Black is understood as a word with no negative connotations by the author, but as to highlight the fact that white and black are the superficial colours of human’s body and that is not a feature that will endure, what is important here is the soul which will be equal under God’s eyes. Blake’s intention is to convey to the readers his moralistic attitude towards racism, and in order to do this he uses Christian religious reasoning. The poem was written within the context of slavery tradition and William Blake was a very deep religious man, this poem shows his abolitionist attitude towards slavery and the importance of religion, the principle that gathers everything together, to solve the problems of the context of slavery.

The formal structure would divide the poem into seven heroic quatrains. However, here we are going to follow a thematic structure that would be divided into 3 parts:

-         first part: lines 1 to 8, the black boy introduces himself

-         second part: lines 9 to 20, the speech of the black boy’s mother

-         and the last part: lines 21 to 28, when the black boy addresses the English boy.

In the first part of the poem, the black boy addresses the readers saying that he was born in the “southern wild”, wild as opposed to civilized, wild representing the blacks and civilized representing the whites. It could also be interpreted as nature vs. civilization. The speaker of the poem does not understand why his skin is black and yet his soul is white, from the very beginning we can notice a contrast between, black and white, and even evil and good. He is "black as if bereav'd of light". He views his race as lacking something, which white, English children are receiving and making them angelic.[ii] Then he introduces his mother who is going to teach him a moral lesson. It is important to mention that the action of teaching happens “underneath a tree” (line 05), Blake’s “tree” could be interpreted in many different ways, in a objective description “A tree is a large, perennial, woody plant… having secondary branches supported on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance”.[iii] The idea that a tree has many branches supported on a single main stem reminds us in the poem of the Christian believe that every single creature is created and supported by one god. Tree could also connote wisdom as the black boy acknowledges the Christian message “underneath a tree” (line 05), furthermore his mother could represent that wisdom and knowledge. And it is also worth to mention that tree may connote the original sin that Adam and Eve committed in paradise, a sin that gave place to the present situation of social injustice and racism.  

Through the second part we witness the child's mother accommodating the boy's understanding of his situation and yet correct it. His mother tells him that he is not lacking light, but that their black skin is protection for their souls. The sun is the source of God's light and heat, or love., which everyone needs, "flowers and trees and beasts and men receive". Some people need to learn to "bear the beams of love" and the dark skin is like a cloud. But white kids have a cloud too, "and he from white cloud". She states that his body is “but a cloud” and his true worth is found in his soul. Here we should point out the important rule played by religion. Blake's poems are full of references to nature, but these are not made from direct observation as a naturalist or a poet like Wordsworth makes them: rather nature is understood as in a book for children or in the Bible: we find exotic, innocent, woolly lambs, trees, etc. All of the poems draw on the Bible for their images.[iv] “Rising sun” (line 09), “light” (line 10), “beams of love” (line 14), and the most representative figure, “heat”, seem all to refer to God.

 

“Heat”(lines 06,10,17, 25) is the most repeated image throughout the poem, it is almost present in every stanza and every time it is mentioned it is a crucial message related to God: “before the heat of the day” (line 06), there is where God resides; “And gives his light, and gives his heat away” (line 10), heat is the power of God and here could imply that God has the power to give life and death; “For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear” (line 17), when human get to understand and endure that “heat”, God will open his arms to accept human; “I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear to lean in joy upon our Father’s knee” (line 25), here the black boy finally understands the meaning of God, and in contrast to this, as it will show the last two stanzas, the English child is ignorant about this knowledge.

 

The rewarding consequences after learning to “bear the heat” is to finally arrive at the God’s golden tent and rejoice like lambs: “And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.” (lines 20, 24). The repetition of these sentence draws our attention to one of the most important symbols used by the author: the lamb. Lamb is a symbol of suffering innocence and Jesus Christ, and here the lambs are those who have learned to bear the heat of God. Thus, the lamb is a strong religious symbol and William Blake makes use of this symbol in many of his poems about innocence.

 

Another important image is that of the bodies compared to a cloud “And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face/Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.” Cloud implies the material, the skin covering the soul. So that when the soul gets rid of its body, then “The cloud will vanish; we shall hear His voice”. In this sense, we could identify these images as  ‘earthy life’ and ‘life after death’ and the moralistic lesson would finally underline the fact that first we should have “learn’d the heat to bear” in order to “hear his voice.”

 

And finally the last part, the black boy learns the lesson taught by his mother and then addresses the English child in order to convey his knowledge. The black boy accepts the prejudices they experience and do not try to obtain equality, but just believe that God loves them and that heaven will be a better place.

 

Blake believed that religion teaches equality for all men, and this is reflected in this poem. All the key elements, in fact, draw our attention to the contradiction between Christian religion and slavery. On the one hand, what western religion teaches is equality between human beings, and on the other hand, how do all these white people, who suppose to follow this religion, still tolerate slavery and social stratification. Blake questions conventions of the time with basic Christian morality.

INNOCENCE                                                                                                       

The black boy represents innocence: Blake first creates a world of innocence where the inhabitants are child-like and are completely accepting of knowledge without any concern for truth or meaning. In Songs of Innocence, the dominant symbol is the child. The poems are narrated from the point of view of a child and represent the youth of the human imagination. At this point in its life, the imagination is not fully formed and does not yet contain its own distinctive character. The child is dependent on the information he receives from adults and does not question their faulty reasoning. This relationship is intended as a commentary on the Christian belief of dependence on God as akin to the child's dependence on its father. The innocent believes that the world is inherently good and that individuality is not important. The innocent's world view is one of "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love" where God the creator bestows meaning upon nature. However, Blake does not believe that an external source can endow nature with meaning. Blake believes that divinity resides within the human breast and so it is the human imagination that gives meaning to the world. He does not believe that the innocent can be truly happy because the innocent does not know the wonders of the human imagination, and so does not truly know nature, not does the innocent have any sense of individuality. The innocent is unknowingly limiting himself because his version of the world is based upon what he has been taught and not a creation of his own imagination.[v]

ILLUSTRATION

As Blake’s poems cannot be conceived separate from the illustrations, to end up this essay I would like to consider some key issues mentioned before that appear in the drawings.

First, the tree is represented both in the two drawings, they both are very big and ancient trees. The tree in the illustration showing the black boy and his mother is a tree full of leafs contrasting with that of a God’s tree characterized by a lack of leafs. Those trees may imply the life and the after life.

Second, the heat is also represented in both images: in the first one is a rising sun and in the second one it is a full formed sun that curiously surrounds God’s head. This corroborates the idea that heat is God or constituting a part of or a power of God. Heat is also represented with warm colours as red in the first one and yellow, the colour of gold, in the second drawing.