The Little Black Boy
Furthermore Blake builds the poem on clear imagery of light and dark. Line 1 reads ‘And I am black, but O! my soul is white’. The contrast of this in the first stanza between the child’s black skin and his belief in the whiteness of the soul lends poignancy to his particular problem of self-understanding. The body and soul, black and white, and earth and heaven are all aligned in a rhetorical gesture that basically confirms the stance of Christian doctrine: the theology of the poem is one that counsels forbearance in the present and promises a recompense for suffering in the hereafter. In a culture in which black and white connote bad and good, respectively, the child’s developing sense of self requires him to perform some fairly symbolic gymnastics with these images of color. Blake’s eye perceived what the poet understood as the spiritual realties that underlie the world of common experience.
As guiding figure The Little Black Boy’s mother symbolizes a natural and selfless love......
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Approximate Pages: 2 (250 words per double-spaced page)
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