The Little Black Boy

In a collection of poems that so often stick to just the religious, moral and spiritual, The Little Black Boy stood out for me because of its politicized and controversial seeming nature. Though the Chimney Sweep among others seems to draw from contemporary society and social problems, The Little Black Boy seems to lie in much more contentious ground, simply because of its blatantly anti slavery, anti bigotry sentiment. Taking a contemporary issue so obviously by the horns and grappling with it seemed like an odd match at first for the Songs of Innocence.

However, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made for this poem to be a part of the Songs of Innocence rather than the Songs of Experience, where such topical political issues might seem to be more at home. A poem like this in Songs of Experience, though, would appear quite different. The understanding that Blake advocates here is extremely hopeful and is wholly an acceptance based in the heavenly sphere: only “When I from black, and he from white cloud free.” Even the little boy listening to his mother seems to recognize that only in heaven, only when “when our souls have learned the heat to bear” and God lets “the cloud” “vanish” will this sort of equality take place. This seems to be, despite debates over what exactly the innocence in Songs of Innocence is all about, to incapsulate the pervading sense of hopefulness and innocence throughout the Songs. Even though topical and controversial, perhaps, The Little Black Boy’s counterpart in Songs of Experience would lack that elemental quality of hopefulness and would expose the ugliness that this poem implies, but elides.