Little Black Boy by William Blake - Essay Example

The Little Black Boy The Little Black Boy by the English poet William Blake tells of a story of black boy pondering on the significance of the color of his skin and the reason why he is different from the white English boy. He tells the reader how his mother has enlightens him on the matter by using traditional Christian doctrine to provide spiritual underpinning to these differences. His mother explains to him that God dwells with the rising sun and the sunlight that it emits nourishes plants and other living things, which is God’s way of showing his love for the world. The mother explains that black people are purposely placed on earth to absorb the heat of the sun and protect others from it. His black skin, according to the mother, is just an outer layer that conceals his inner true spirit that is no different from others with lighter color, which will be revealed when God will, one day, call everyone out to heaven. The boy further muses that as a heat-absorber, he can help protect a white boy from the heat of the sun so that the latter can bear it and finally, learn to appreciate him. Blake structured the poem as a heroic quatrain to give the poem and its subject a sense of earnestness and loftiness whilst heavily using metaphors of colours and shades on the side to provide sharp contrasting images between good and evil and attractive and repulsive, among others. The poem is made up of seven stanzas, each of which has four lines qualifying them as quatrains. Lines A and C of every stanza rhymes at the end and which is true as well for lines B and D. Thus, in the first stanza, the line A ends with the word ‘wild’ which rhymes with the word ‘child’ at the end of line C; whilst the word ‘white’ at the end of line B rhymes with the word ‘light’ that ends line D. The ABAB pattern is replicated in the six other stanzas. Meanwhile, the poem is laid down in an iambic pentameter metrical feet, with each line having a set of five unstressed/stressed words. Thus, in the first line “My mother bore me in the southern wild,” the syllables ‘My’ (unstressed) and ‘moth-‘ (stressed) form one iambic meter and the rest are: ‘-er’ (unstressed) and ‘bore’ (stressed); ‘me’ (unstressed) and ‘in’ (stressed); ‘the’ (unstressed) and ‘south-‘ (stressed), and; ‘-ern’ (unstressed) and ‘wild’ (stressed). As can be see, there are five of these pairs in every line. These metrical characteristics make the poem The Little Black Boy a heroic quatrain. As defined by Merriam-Webster, a heroic quatrain or heroic stanza, “is a rhymed quatrain in heroic verse with a rhyme scheme of abab” (2003 p. 583) John Dryden, an important English poet in the 17th century praised the iambic parameter quatrain as “more noble, and of greater dignity, both for sound and number, than any other Verse in use” in his time. On the other hand, William Shenstone, another English poet, thought that heroic verses in iambic pentameter is most useful in expressing serious matters such as elegies, which probably accounted for the fact that heroic quatrains later came to be known as elegiac verses. Shenstone argued that shorter stanzas, such as couplets, tend to break the sense of the poem, in long poems, periodically resulting in the frequent discontinuity of flow of thought and sense. Heroic quatrains are seen as a happy compromise between the shorter couplet and the free verse form (Doody 1985 p. 246). Author Edward Hirsch agrees with this perspective, noting that heroic quatrains engenders complete individual stanzas, each of which “forms a solid block of meaning” (2000 p. 302) In the present poem, the iambic pentameter heroic quatrain has achieved this purpose – giving the poem a feeling of gravity, which is fitting to its pedagogical intent. Metaphors abound in the poem. In the first quatrain, for example, Blake uses the colours “black” and “white” to imply bad or repulsive and good or attractive, respectively. From the way the boy speaks of ‘black,’ the colour seems to elicit bad memories, perhaps from his experience in the way others treated him because of his colour. This is in contrast to “white,” which he associates with an angel and his soul. He thus, stresses emphatically here that although he may be seen as ugly or bad, his soul is white and therefore, he is as good as a white English child who he refers to as an ‘angel.’ Nevertheless, the boy seems to connote a sense of sadness for being born ‘black’ as can be seen in the last line “But I am black as if bereav’d of light” as if he associated the colour with sin. In the second, third, fourth and fifth quatrains, the boy narrates how his mother explains to him why he is not of the same colour as the white English boy, perhaps to appease his unhappiness and to give him a sense of confidence. Using conventional Christian doctrine and spirituality to explain a physical condition where disparity of skin colour has led to extreme suffering and discrimination, the mother invoke God’s infinite wisdom to justify what seems to be a physical injustice. Blake uses the simplistic allegory of the rising sun as God, which is acceptable here considering that the mother is attempting to explain a complicated matter such as skin colour disparity to a boy of tender age. Moreover, the mother is allowed to commit a scientific falsity in the line “That we may learn to bear the beams of the sun” where she suggests that the boy’s skin colour is due to the fact that his skin absorbs much of the heat of the sun than people with lighter skin. However, Blake could have meant this line to be something deeper such as a metaphor of the black people’s learning to bear suffering from constant prejudice drawing them closer to God’s heart. This is supported by the lines “For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear/The clouds will vanish we shall hear his voice,” which is a metaphor for having learnt how to suffer the persecution brought about by prejudice, God will reward them by calling them out of the “grove” (metaphor for earth or temporary shelter) and into his “golden tent” (metaphor for heaven) where they are to rejoice as His lambs (metaphor for good, obedient people). These quatrains also show the mother as a metaphor of unconditional and selfless love patiently soothing the boy and finding a way of explaining to him why he is not as “beautiful” and “good” as the white English boy, emphasising that skin is only a temporary shell, a “cloud” and “a shady grove.” These metaphors of “cloud” and “shady grove” emphasise not only that the skin is only a covering for the real person underneath it but that it is only temporary and whatever suffering it may have caused, will eventually move away just like the clouds moving away to reveal a silver lining behind them. In the last sixth and seventh quatrains, the boy has come to terms with his different physical attribute, interprets the explanation of his mother and applies it to his relationship with the white English boy. In these quatrains, the boy reveals not only his longing to be accepted by the English boy, but to be like him. Blake again uses the contrasting metaphor of ‘black’ and ‘white’ but this time, he stresses their temporality in the line “When I from black and he from white cloud free,” implying that there will come a time when their colours do not anymore matter and they will play together without regardless of the difference in their skin colour or race. The entire poem itself is one big metaphor of the dilemma of the black people who are suffering from prejudice because of the colour of their skin. Like the little boy, they longed to be accepted as equals by the whites people in a world where colour is not used the measure of one’s worth. In their quest for answers as to why they are made differently causing prejudice against them, they have looked up to God for explanation hoping that one day their suffering will earn them His grace. References: Blake, W. (1789). The Little Black Boy. Doody, M.A. (1985). The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered. CUP Archive. Hirsch, E. (2000). How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Merriam-Webster (2003). Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition. Merriam-Webster. Read More