The Little Black Boy In Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience the poet "illuminate" us by exploring and contraposing two different perspectives of the world, which are the innocent, world of childhood, that the poet personifies with the young piper, and the adult world contaminated by reason and morals, that is incarnated by the bard. In this essay, I will attempt to explicate the poem The Little Black Boy from the Songs of Innocence. I have enjoyed more the reading of this first book of songs more than the Experience ones, because to me innocence can be viewed as hope, or blitheness and I do not feel that we are condemned, that our earthly life should not be considered as a "l ...view middle of the document...
The first of two of this poem's illustrations is based on the content of the second and the third stanzas. In fact, what is represented is the image of the African mother and her child sitting under the comforting shadow of a tree, and a low sun in the horizon is rising at east. But I have noticed that there is one element of difference from the poem, because while the poem says "And (the mother) pointing to the east began to say", in the illustration is the little black boy who is pointing up to the sky with is finger, almost as if he wanted to show us the way toward which the human soul should strive for. In the second stanza, for some reason, resurfaces from my mind this bucolic image, in fact even if the two are not attending any herd, there is that sense of quietness, of peace that could be found only in the country; also this bucolic image is triggered by the humble origins of the two characters. It is under what I can consider the "tree of wisdom", that offers shelter to everybody without making any distinction about color, that the mother teaches her son of God's infinite mercy. It is God who gives light and life to all creation, and comfort and joy to men. In the forth stanza comes into play the idea of immortality of the soul; clearly Blake believes in the after-life, in accordance with the Christian doctrine, and he sees life as just being a mere brief passage, but fundamental to men, because it is during this passage that we learn to accept God's love. The second half of the stanza reaffirm the idea of immortality, because men's outside "Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove", I found this similitude to be very acute, and at a closer look the word cloud can be ambivalent, because a cloud is vapor , therefore inconsistent, condition t...
