My Reading of Blake’s “The Little Black Boy”

     Helen Losse has a provocative blog entry about the poem “The Little Black Boy” by WIlliam Blake.  She asks whether there is racism in the poem, and then some other commenters and I chimed in.  Here’s my interpretation of the poem:

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Centrality of the Sun

     The sun is the primary symbol of the poem, as well as the key to understanding it.  The important irony of the poem turns on the effect of the sun on human beings.  In the poem the sun represents God, and its beams of light represent God’s love.

     In the third stanza, the Black Boy’s mother tells him to look at the rising sun.  The image of the rising sun is a biblical reference.  In the book of Malachi, God says, “And to all of you who love and revere my name will the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.”  The sun rises in the east, and it is from the east that Jesus came, teaching love and equality.  The beams of the sun bring healing.

     The mother points out that the light of the sun is a gift from God for all living things.  It is given freely and equally to all of them.  Later she will point out that some receive the gift more easily than others.

     The middle stanza begins with the words, “And we are put on earth a little space/That we might learn to bear the beams of love.”  Here in the center of the poem are words that unlock the meaning of the rest of the poem.  The purpose of our time on earth is to learn to “bear”–that is to accept and tolerate–the love of God.  White people in Blake’s time had not learned to bear it very well at all.

The Irony of “Sunburnt Skin”

     At the beginning of the poem, the Little Black Boy says that he is “black, as if bereav’d of light.”  The words “as if” are very important.  They indicate to me that the Black Boy does not necessarily accept the view that he is bereaved of light, as the English people would have him believe.  The “as if” hints that things are not as they appear at first glance.

     The lesson that the Little Black Boy learns from his mother is that the white people have it backwards.  Their white skin, reflects the light, but his black skin absorbs it.  His skin makes him able to bear the light and heat of the sun, while the English Boy’s white skin is a liability.  Symbolically speaking, the Black Boy can tolerate the love of God, and will thus be able to lean against God’s knee in heaven.  The White Boy, on the other hand, will still have to learn to be near God and to receive His love in heaven.  

     Far from being “bereav’d of light,” the Little Black Boy is full of light, because he is able to bask in it–something that the English Boy will only learn after he dies.

The Irony of Being “Like Him”

     By the time he reaches heaven, The Little Black Boy has learned to love white people, even though they do not deserve his love.  He can love the English Boy because he has been able to absorb the love of God.  He is willing to teach him, to shield him from the heat of God’s love, and to wait patiently until he learns.  Most amazingly he is willing to forgive him for past wrongs.

     When the Black Boy says, “I will be like him,” he doesn’t mean that he has become white like the English Boy.  I believe he means, instead, that the English Boy finally recognizes that the Black Boy is and always has been just like him.  The English Boy is finally able to receive God’s love which is impartial and given to all nature equally, as the third stanza says.  Both the Black Boy and the English boy have shed the “clouds,” which symbolize their physical bodies.  They are neither black nor white.

The Color Symbolism

     Black and White represent different things to different people in the poem.  To the English, their white skin means that they look “angelic” while black skin means that Africans are “bereav’d of light.”  To the Little Balck Boy’s mother they are just different kinds of clouds.  The black cloud absorbs or “bears” light while the white cloud can only reflect it back without taking it in.

     Gold and silver are used for things that are beyond black and white.  The tent of God is golden, referring back, I think, to the sun.  At the end, the transformed English Boy has silver hair.  He is no longer white.  He can finally bear God’s love and can finally love the Black Boy as he should have all along.

FURTHER NOTES

     The line “white as an angel is the English child” is very intriguing to me.  Blake might be alluding to a story in Bede about Pope Gregory.  When he saw some fair-skinned boys in the slave market, Gregory asked what tribe they were from.  When he was told that they were Angles, he said that they were rightly named for they had the face of angels.  It seems to me that Blake is making a jab at a centuries-old symbolism that equated light skin and English identity with being angelic.  [Pope Gregory's intent, as I read his famous pun, is that they and their people should be converted to Christianity so that they could end up being in heaven as angels.] 

     William Blake was a Swedenborgian, an unorthodox Christian.  He believed in the existence of the soul, but not as an entity distinct from the body.  That explains the thin line between literal use of black and white skin and sunlight in the poem and the symbolic use of those items.

     He rejected religion, but had very strong religious beliefs himself.  He believed in the existence of God, and claimed to have had visions of God.

     Blake believed in the innate goodness of all human beings and in universalism.  For Blake, there could not be simply a “good guy” and a “bad guy,” because that kind of dichotomy simply did not fit into his worldview.  Therefore, he saw human life on earth–and even the afterlife–as a learning and growing experience from which everyone would eventually emerge morally sound.  He rejected the doctrine of Hell or of any kind of judgment or wrath on the part of God.

     Blake was an ardent abolitionist and believed deeply in both racial and sexual equality.  Any attempt to read racism into this poem strikes me as wrongheaded.  The intent of the poem is to expose racism as wrong and to challenge the racial and religious views of his people in his day.  If my reading is right, Blake stands all the conventional ideas about race on their head in this poem.

SOURCES AND FURTHER INFORMATION:

• Wikipedia article on WIlliam Blake
• Bio of WIlliam Blake at Poets.org
• Wm Blake’s Life at Virtual Union (Union College)
• The Blake Multimedia Project (College of Liberal Arts, California Polytechnic)
• Timeline of Criticism of “The Little Black Boy”  (The English Department of the University of Georgia)
• William Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians by Robert Rix