The Little Black Boy (Innocence): Notes

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In this child-monologue Blake's treatment of the little black boy's perspective on Christianity and salvation may well be ironic, forming the basis for a more savage attack on religious and social hypocrisy. The child's mother consoles the child with a vision of a better life to come, away from the prejudices and hardship of this life, and the child accepts this, encouraging him to a further vision of leading (rather than being led by) the little white English boy to God and Heaven. The mother's teaching may itself be a form of 'innocence', and the boy's vision of a Heaven, transcending the divisions of race, is certainly 'innocent'. The central question the poem raises, like Holy Thursday (Innocence) is what Blake's attitude is towards the child's (and the mother's) attitudes: does he see them as touchingly naive, or tragically misguided? Throughout the poem, in the references to 'black' and 'white', Blake plays around with the traditional associations between 'white' and 'good', but also, in the little black boy's views on Soul/Body, makes the point that colour is skin deep, but colour is no indication of spiritual state. The poem should, perhaps, be approached in the light of British attitudes towards missionaries, and arguments about the abolition of slavery in the late eighteenth century.


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