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Uploaded by neilfin on Feb 22, 2004
One of the first writers of the Romantic period William Blake’s writings are a curious mixture, his voice in the early 1790’s was the conscience of the Romantic Age. He was an artist with words and believed himself to be guided by visions from the spiritual world, which lie heavy in this poem I have chosen. In this essay I would like to focus on the poem ‘Little Black Boy’ to which Blake centers on the spiritual awaking to a divine love that transcends race. It tells of how the ‘Little Black Boy’ came to know his identity and to know God.
To begin with Blake’s poem is dramatic that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. This poem of Blake’s uses the Little Black Boy to narrate the poem in first person. This projects the reader clearly inside the consciousness of the boy in the poem giving us the images from the defined observer. As a result Blake stands outside innocence and experience in a distance position. The innocence is from ‘Songs of Innocence’, Blake’s first collection of poems, to which Blake’s subject matter shows the innocent, pastoral world of childhood. This was juxtaposed with experience, which was taken from ‘Songs of Experience’, his other collection, which shows the adult world of corruption and repression. Therefore showing the two contrary states of the human soul. The ‘songs of innocence’ dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children, namely the ‘Little Black Boy’ who tells this didactic story about himself in this poem.
The form of the poem is in heroic quatrains, which are stanza of pentameter lines rhyming ABAB. This standard rhyme and alliteration is exemplified by repetition in the line-final (in couplets) by individual sounds parallel, this occurs in this poem with the repetition of sounds; for example ‘wild’ and ‘child’ in line 1 and 3 made by the final consonant cluster, also in ‘tree’ and ‘me’ in line 5 and 7 which for the final end word sound pattern the vowel sound is repeated. Blake’s form is a variation on the ballad stanza, and the slightly longer lines for this poem are well suited to the pedagogical tone of this poem.
Blake uses powerful imagery with metaphors and similes, ‘White as an angel is the English child’, ‘ But I as if bereaved of light’ to refer to...