The Little Boy Lost | British Literature Wiki

The Little Boy Lost:

==From Songs of Innocence== “Father! father! where are you going?O do not walk so fast
Speak, father, speak to your little boy,
Or else I shall be lost.

“The night was dark, no father was there;
The child was wet with dew;
The mire was deep, & the child did weep,
And away the vapour flew.

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

A Little Boy Lost:

==From Songs of Experience== “Nought loves another as itself,”
Nor venerates another so,
“Nor is it possible to Thought”
A greater than itself to know:

“And Father, how can I love you”
Or any of my brothers more?
“I love you like the little bird
“That picks up crumbs around the door.”

The Priest sat by and heard the child,
In trembling zeal he siez’d his hair:
He led him by his little coat,
And all admir’d the Priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,
“Lo! what a fiend is here!” said he,
“One who sets reason up for judge
“Of our most holy Mystery.”

The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain;
They strip’d him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain;

And burn’d him in a holy place,
Where many had been burn’d before:
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

Phtograph from Wikimedia Commons.

In both versions of of this poem, you find a young boy that in crying out in despair. Notice the tonal differences in the titles; The Little Boy Lost, versus A Little Boy Lost. Such a simple change suggests that the reasons for the child’s emotional state may not be the same. In The Little Boy Lost, the boy is crying out to his father after being separated from him in the dewy, dark night. In A Little Boy Lost, however, it seems as though the Father may actually be God. In a more experienced state of mind, the child is questioning God. He commits blasphemy by equating God with earthly things. The priest, hearing this cry, charges the boy with an account of blasphemy and burns him at a holy place, presumably a church. It seems that the narrator is criticizing the church for its hypocrisy. It appears to be good, but is willing to burn a boy for mere blasphemy. It’s clear that Blake had two different intentions to these mirror poems, and for further knowledge of these two particular poems, read their opposite companion poems, entitled The Little Boy Found:

The Little Boy Found (from Songs of Innocence)

The following link is a youtube.com video reading of three Blake poems: The Little Boy Lost and A Little Boy Found (From Songs of Innocence) and A Little Boy Lost (from Songs of Experience)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMrIBudc9Tc&eurl

Back to the Companion Poems main page.

Photographs borrowed from:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/William_Blake