THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

 

THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

‘The Little Black Boy’ is a poem written by the English mystical poet William Blake (1757-1827).  It is included in his small anthology The Songs of Innocence and of Experience which contain some of the most charming lyrics ever written in English. The very first song entitled INTRODUCTION runs as follows:

Piing down the valley wild,

Piping song of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:

‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’

So I piped with merry cheer.

‘Piper, pipe that song again;

So I piped : he wept to hear.

‘Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.’

So he vanish’d from my sight,

And I pluck’d a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain’d the water clear

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

‘Innocence’ in Blake’s anthology stands for childhood and ‘Experience’ for adulthood.  The child has a pure, untainted mind. The mind of an adult is overlaid with the craftiness of the world.

While composing the Songs of Innocence, Blake himself became a child ‘living in a world of happiness, beauty, and love; and when he does  not act as  a child, he becomes ‘a loving, tender mother.’

According to George H. Cowling: ‘Blake’s Songs of Innocence are the songs of an imaginative and serious child. They are the divine voice of childhood unchallenged by the test and the doubts of experience. Contrarily, The Songs of Experience are the songs of the wounds and cruelties of civilisation, and some are satirical of the “mind-forg’d  manacles” of custom and law.  

“The Little Black Boy” is luckily a song of innocence, though most shockingly even today the  beauty, goodness and truth of human beings are judged by the colour of their skins and not by the divine souls dwelling in their bodies. Blake includes this poem in the first part of his anthology “Songs of Experience”, but “The Chimney Sweeper” – A LITTLE BLACK THING , finds place in The Songs of Experience. This poem is likely to remind some    readers of  the two  essays of Charles Lamb  (1775-1834) . The first  IN Praise of Chimney-Sweepers,   and the second Imperfect Sympathies in which he says:

            “In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearning of tenderness towards some of these faces --- or rather masks – that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls – these “images of God cut in ebony.” But I should not like to associate with them to share my meals and my good night with them – because they are black.”             

            Blake’s song” The Chimney- Sweeper, II ” reads as follows:

A LITTLE black thing among the snow,

Crying’ ‘weep!’ in notes of woe!

‘Where are thy father and mother? Say?’ ---

‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.

 

‘Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smil’d among the winter’s snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,  

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

 

‘And because I am happy, and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,

Who make up a heaven of our misery.’

            The song points out that priest and king, the representatives of the moral and civil law see only the momentary happiness of the chimney sweepers and turn a blind eye to their unending painful slavery.

             The text of THE LITTLE BLACK BOY  is as follows:

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 bereav’d 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, 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.”

 

            George H. Cowling observes that like some of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, Blake regarded savages as noble children of nature  and agreed with Rousseau that “the first impulses of nature are always right.”  However, he feels that Blake has perhaps idealised the black boy more than he really deserved.

Cowling rightly notes that towards the end of the poem Blake skilfully passes from a pagan to a Christian conception of God and though the god of the black boy becomes a sun-god, children become His lambs.   

 

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15^th March 2021                                                                                 G. R. Kanwal