The Little Black Boy
William Blake 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 oflight.
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 littlespace,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and thissunburnt 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'sknee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me. Summary A black child tells the story of how he came to know his ownidentity and to know God. The boy, who was born in “the southern wild” of Africa, first explains that though his skin isblack his soul is as white as that of an English child. He relates how his loving mother taught him about God who lives in the East, who gives light and life to all creation andcomfort and joy to men. “We are put on earth,” his mother says, to learn to accept God’s love. He is told that his black skin “is but a cloud” that will be dissipated when his soul meets God in heaven. The blackboy passes on this lesson to anEnglish child, explaining that his white skin is likewise a cloud. He vows that when they are both free of their bodies and delighting in the presence of God, he will shade his white friend until he, too, learns to bear the heat of God’s love. Then, the black boy says, he will be like the English boy, andthe English boy will love him. Form The poem is in heroic quatrains, which are stanzas ofpentameter lines rhyming ABAB. The form is a variation on the ballad stanza, and the slightly longer lines are well suited to the pedagogical tone of this poem. Commentary This poem centers on a spiritual awakening to a divinelove that transcends race. The speaker is an African child whohas to come to terms with his own blackness. Blake builds the poem on clear imagery of light and dark. The contrast in the first stanza between the child’s black skin and his belief in the whiteness of his soul lends poignancy to his particular problem of self-understanding. In a culturein which black and white connote bad and good, respectively, the child’s developing sense of self requires him to perform some fairly elaborate symbolic gymnastics with these images of color. His statement that he is “black as if bereav’d of light”underscores the gravity of the problem. The gesture of his song will be to counteract this “as if” in a way that shows himto be as capable and deservingof perfect love as a white person is.
The child’s mother symbolizes a natural and selfless love that becomes the poem’s ideal. She shows a tender concern for her child’s self-esteem, as well as a strong desire that he know the comfort of God. She persuades him, according to conventional Christian doctrine, that earthly life is but a preparation for the rewards of heaven. In this context, theirdark skin is similarly but a temporary appearance, with no bearing on their eternal essence: skin, which is a factoronly in this earthly life, becomes irrelevant from the perspective of heaven. Body and soul, black and white, and earth and heaven are all aligned in a rhetorical gesture that basically confirms the stance of Christian resignation:the theology of the poem is one that counsels forbearance in the present and promises a recompense for suffering in the hereafter.
The black boy internalizes his mother’s lesson and applies it in his relations with the outer world; specifically, Blake showsus what happens when the boy applies it to his relationship with a white child.The results are ambivalent. Theboy explains to his white friend that they are equals, but that neither will be truly free until they are released from theconstraints of the physical world. He imagines himself shading his friend from the brightness of God’s love until he can become accustomed to it. This statement implies that the black boy is better prepared for heaven than the white boy, perhaps because of the greater burden of his dark skin has posed during earthly life. This is part of the consoling vision with which his mother has prepared him, which allows his suffering to become a source of pride rather than shame. But the boy’s outlook, and his deference to the white boy, may strike the reader (who hasnot his innocence) as containing a naive blindness tothe realities of oppression and racism, and a too-passive acceptance of suffering and injustice. We do not witness the response of the white boy; Blake’s focus in this poem is onthe mental state of the black child. But the question remainsof whether the child’s outlook is servile and self-demeaning, or exemplifies Christian charity.The poem itself implies that these might amount to the same thing. »Livan.wapsite.me
