William Blake's "The Little Black Boy"

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 bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree,

    And, sitting down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissèd me,

    And, pointing to the East, began to say:

'Look at 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 noonday.

'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 sunburnt face

    Are 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 and care,

    And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice."'

Thus did my mother say, and kissèd 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.

The coincidence happens to be that by chance, while studying Phillis Wheatley as the African poetess prodigy and fore-mother of African American poetry in my Contemporary African American Poetry class, I came across William Blake's "The Little Black Boy" in  Songs of Innocence. Indeed, some English majors, literary critics, poetry scholars and practicing poets may not understand the connection between Wheatley and Blake. However, I do. Many of Wheatley's critics have accused her of not being in tune with her African or Black culture. What they failed to realize and furthermore recognize is that, like in all poetry, the poet has a certain audience to attend to. Even though, primarily her poetry seems to renounce the African slave's struggle in (what were then) the British Colonies, a strict and thoughtful analysis of her work reveals that she was very in tune with what needed to be said by her for her people. 

Shortly after Wheatley's  inconspicuous death, Blake published "The Little Black Boy" in Songs of Innocence. Like most of Wheatley's poetry, this poem acknowledges its audience. That audience consisted of middle-class white citizens living in a patriarchal and pro-slavery society. Speaking to the same audience Wheatley spoke to, Blake was able to use his poetry in a  more direct way opposed to Wheatley due to their different social statuses. Socially critiquing the unjust ways of the American people, in "The Little Black Boy" Blake discusses race relations, religion, and equality for all mankind (just as Wheatley does indirectly in her poetry). The imagery of the poem is astonishing. The speaker in the poem, a Southern born black youth, explains that through folklore, his mother tells him that God is a giving God and has given them "a little space/That [they/everybody] may learn to bear the beams of love." Although there are many illusions and symbolic poetic aspects I can pull from this piece, I'll use that quote as the central thesis for Blake's poem. Within those two lines, Blake is stating that God has given everyone the ability to love and care for one another. That opinion is a counterargument against most of his peers who viewed white people as being superior to the enslaved Africans whom most thought were emotionless and unable to understand the theological virtue of love.