[Roger Slater]

I'm not sure what issues of mastery this poem will raise, but I wanted to type it out anyway to help me memorize it (it's one of my favorite poems on earth) so I figured I'd share my typing with the rest of you. I think there's a lot about Blake's metrics that bears discussion, in this and many other poems as well.

Why does this Blake poem sound (assuming you agree with me) so sumptuous and melodic and rich and varied, and how does he create such heartbreaking emotion with such a pronounced and almost sing-songy meter?


THE LITTLE BLACK BOY
by William Blake

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 knee and kisséd 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 noon day.

"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 sun-burnt 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 & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.'"

Thus did my mother say, and kisséd 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.

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by Roger Slater:
I think there's a lot about Blake's metrics that bears discussion, in this and many other poems as well. Blake is a poet that I have always liked and re-read but never "examined".

Why does this Blake poem sound (assuming you agree with me) so sumptuous and melodic and rich and varied, and how does he create such heartbreaking emotion with such a pronounced and almost sing-songy meter? I think we have a match between the "persona of the poem" (the black boy who is not a native english speaker) and the wording. He talks like someone using English as a second language (the rhythms he uses sounding like they derive from his first language). And the things he says are "simplistic"--he thinks like a child. His mother has explained her religion to him as simply as she can and this he now incorporates into what he has been taught of Christianity. (Africa today has it own cultural Christianities distressing the Pope.) He is obviously a slave serving as an unbrella boy for his young master. It is his compassion for his master that tugs at us. His Christianity has "tamed" him, teaching him to accept his lot. He is a good "boy" and yet somehow "better" than his young master. We are made to feel the injustice of slavery by being made to "see" the slave's humanity juxapositioned against his condition. (By the way, imagine how this poem would sound if Wordsworth had written it [ugh]--it would have been another of his great "clunkers".)

[Robt_Ward]

Roger:

Start/programs/accessories/system tools/keyboard map utility

Click on any letter and note its code.

Then in your work type the code while holding down the "alt" key.

é -- alt + 0233

Num Lock must be on.

Note the codes for the ones you use most, and memorize 'em.

Some good ones:

alt + 0151 : — (em dash)
alt + 0150 : – (en dash)
alt + 0189 : ½
alt + 0190 : ¾

Try some yourself and see what you get, LOL

(robt)

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks for posting this, Roger. It is one of my favorite Blake poems and I find it absolutely heart-breaking. The dramatic irony, of course, is the trust and faith and naivete of the little boy, who has not yet been disabused of these fond notions by the world, as we know he will. It is also quite wrenching that he would seek to shade the little English boy, being perhaps better able to bear the full glare of the sun of love. I suppose I'd prefer not to read this through too much of a prism of post-colonialist theory (it is spiritual hypocrisy--in the face of racism--, I think, being criticised, not Western religion per se--that strikes me as applying too much post-modern hind-sight to this). It is true that the poem is social satire, of course, but it is also about more fundamental human issues.

(It is not unlike another such persona poem, the one about the chimney sweep, who is also innocent and deluded, a poem all the more damning of society by the lack of editorial comment. That there are no longer child chimney sweeps in no way lessens the poem's power for us now. The issue of the exploitation of childhood and child labour remains all too topical.)

The power of the voice in this poem aided by the childish simplicity of the sentence structure, a nursery-rime-ish balance of phrases, etc., emphasized by the end-stopped phrases in the pentameter.

I particularly like,

And gives his light, and gives his heat away.

God/Sun doesn't just give his light and heat, he gives them "away." This suggests even more generosity and selflessness somehow.

The more I have read this poem, the more complexity it offers. Take, for instance, the "silver hair" of the blond English boy at the end. This is both a very good description of a certain tow-headed childish hair color, but also the black boy unwittingly suggests that the English boy will be very old indeed before he learns the lesson of love.

[Hugh Clary]

I found the switch to pidgin English in the penultimate stanza to be most confusing. The speaker is the LBB, from the beginning of the poem, so why switch to dialect at all?

[Roger Slater]

For much of the poem, the speaker is the LBB's mother being quoted by the LBB. She may have somewhat different speech patterns than her son.

Anyway, I don't think the "pidgin" touches detract from the poem at all. In fact, I think they lend it much of its charm, since even the "pidgin" touches are delivered sweetly and with exquisite meter. (Only the "is" instead of "are" brings me up ever-so-slightly short). It could be that some of the "pidgin" touches creep in more at the end when the emotion mounts and the LBB presumably may be resorting to his more elemental manner of speaking.

I posted this to try to find out why I've always loved the poem so very much, both for its music and its content, but I'm afraid that question maybe can't be answered except to say that sometimes magic happens. Not very useful, but for me it's ultimately the truth.

Alicia, I was very happy to read your comments and find that your reaction was so close to mine. So much of Blake is astonishingly good, but I certainly agree that this is one of his very best.

[A. E. Stallings]

Hector,

I'm not sure this is meant to be Pigin English--though perhaps it is. English grammar wasn't as codified in Blake's time as it was later in the 19th century, and I think the verb "is" has probably been attracted into the singular by its proximity to the singular "face". I could be wrong, of course. But say, in the Chimney Sweep or other poems, there is plenty of room for the colloquial, but they are also fairly standard English (with the exception of the baby-talk-pun of "'weep, 'weep, 'weep").

Roger,


Yes, there is a DOUBLE irony here, in the speaker's relating his mother's naive advice. A similar double remove is achieved in "The Chimney Sweeper," which I post below (a boy relating the dream of another boy). It is partly that double remove, I think, that allows Blake to get away with such an emotional subject without slipping into the sentimental. Both of these poems are from "Songs of Innocence." The Chimney Sweeper has a corresponding poem in "Songs of Experience," but the "Little Black Boy" does not appear to, although the two poems themselves seem to have much in common. This is in a more exhuberant meter--a triple-rhythm tetrameter (adding yet another layer of irony) as opposed to the quieter & more serious ip of LBB.


THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd, so I said
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet, and that very night
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

[A. E. Stallings]

For a facsimile of the illuminated page of "The Little Black Boy":

http://images.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?type=detail&cc=blake&entryid=X- 1&viewid=9

[Hugh Clary]

Most interesting, thanks Alicia. I had only seen black and white images before, on the pages at,

http://www.english.uga.edu/wblake/SONGS/9/9frall.html


a site that is filled with information one can get by clicking on parts of the picture (or navigating around the links at the top corners), and working one's way around the frames. An interesting note to be found there was in the close up of the image on the second page, where it appears there is a human face on the left arm of God(?). I cannot make that out in the color picture, even at maximum resolution.

[Alan Sullivan]

I can't resist putting this up. Some years ago I wrote a series of eight Blake parodies. They've never been published, the market for parody being even thinner than the market for formal poetry in general. But some of you might be amused...


The Little White Boy

My mother bore me in the northern wild,
And I am white, but O my soul is black;
Black as a devil is the Moorish child,
But I am white, the hue of loss and lack.

For strength my mother chafed me in the snow
Which fell each autumn ere the lifeless leaves.
She pushed me from her breast which would not flow
And pointing west, sighed over frozen sheaves:

"Behold the setting sun---there Yaweh lives
Basking in warmth, hoarding the sacred light.
To people of the pale-skinned north he gives
Dolor at evening, death in the dark night.

"We dwell upon earth for a paltry space
That we may learn to praise the sun so hot;
And this white stain, this frostbitten face
Is only a shroud, or a tattered coat.

"For when our souls have vanquished every sin,
The stain will vanish, and Yaweh will sing
Saying: Cast off thy coats, my mortal kin,
And round my golden orb like moths take wing."

Thus taught my mother ere she joined the dead,
And thus I tell my little Moorish friend:
When I the white and he the black coat shed,
And round the lamp of God like moths we wend,

I shall spin with him on the lambent air
Till north and south revolve in harmony;
Then I shall pause to stroke his kinky hair
And kiss his cheek, and he will then love me.

Alan Sullivan