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Unit 26: William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience

with understanding and compassion, we will be called to God’s presence when all distinctions will Notes
have gone and will rejoice around him like laments.
The lesson that the mother provides for her little son ends each time with an affectionate kiss. The
little black boy has finally regained his confidence and is bold enough to tell the white little English
boy that they are both clouds-like spirit coming from different coloured background. Like two little
lambs of different colours, they can sing and dance with joy around the tent of God in Heaven.
The little black boy promised to take care of the little white English boy and protect him from the
scorching heat of the sun till he himself learn to bear it for himself. Both shall prostrate before The
Father in Heaven’s knees. Then he would stand and stroke the Father’s silvery hair and he would
be like the Father and be loved by Him.

Form
The poem is in heroic quatrains, which are stanzas of pentameter lines rhyming ABAB. The form is a
variation on the ballad stanza, and the slightly longer lines are well suited to the pedagogical tone of
this poem.

Commentary

This poem centers on a spiritual awakening to a divine love that transcends race. The speaker is an
African child who has to come to terms with his own blackness. Blake builds the poem on clear
imagery of light and dark. The contrast in the first stanza between the child’s black skin and his belief
in the whiteness of his soul lends poignancy to his particular problem of self-understanding. 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 elaborate symbolic gymnastics with these images of color.
His statement that he is “black as if bereav’d of light” underscores the gravity of the problem. The
gesture of his song will be to counteract this “as if” in a way that shows him to be as capable and
deserving of perfect love as a white person is.
The child’s mother symbolizes a natural and selfless love that becomes the poem’s ideal. She shows
a tender concern for her child’s self-esteem, as well as a strong desire that he know the comfort of
God. She persuades him, according to conventional Christian doctrine, that earthly life is but a
preparation for the rewards of heaven. In this context, their dark skin is similarly but a temporary
appearance, with no bearing on their eternal essence: skin, which is a factor only in this earthly life,
becomes irrelevant from the perspective of heaven. Body and soul, black and white, and earth and
heaven are all aligned in a rhetorical gesture that basically confirms the stance of Christian resignation:
the theology of the poem is one that counsels forbearance in the present and promises a recompense
for suffering in the hereafter.
The black boy internalizes his mother’s lesson and applies it in his relations with the outer world;
specifically, Blake shows us what happens when the boy applies it to his relationship with a white
child. The results are ambivalent. The boy explains to his white friend that they are equals, but that
neither will be truly free until they are released from the constraints of the physical world. He
imagines himself shading his friend from the brightness of God’s love until he can become
accustomed to it. This statement implies that the black boy is better prepared for heaven than the
white boy, perhaps because of the greater burden of his dark skin has posed during earthly life.
This is part of the consoling vision with which his mother has prepared him, which allows his
suffering to become a source of pride rather than shame. But the boy’s outlook, and his deference to
the white boy, may strike the reader (who has not his innocence) as containing a naive blindness to
the realities of oppression and racism, and a too-passive acceptance of suffering and injustice. We
do not witness the response of the white boy; Blake’s focus in this poem is on the mental state of the
black child. But the question remains of whether the child’s outlook is servile and self-demeaning,
or exemplifies Christian charity. The poem itself implies that these might amount to the same thing.

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