A Little Boy Lost
"A Little Boy Lost" is a poem of the Songs of Experience series created in 1794 after the Songs of Innocence by the poet William Blake. The poem centres on the theme of religious persecution and the corrupted dictates of dogmatic Church teachings. As part of Songs of Experience the poem is set in the wider context of exploring the suffering of innocent and oppressed individuals—in this case a young boy, and his parents—within a flawed society that is oppressed and disillusioned with life's experience.
The poem
Analysis
The poem is divided into six quatrains, all in iambic tetrameter. The first quatrain The second quatrain is the much simpler speech of a little boy expressing his thoughts on love of God, of others, and of nature.First quatrain
Blake says that it is impractical to assume that one can love something, or someone, more than themselves; and that something unprovable cannot supersede knowledge itself. The language is highly stylised.Second quatrain
A little boy, the titular character, continues the first quatrain by likening love of God to the love of the abstract, or any love that cannot be reciprocated, i.e. " the little bird". He asks the priest how God can be loved more than any other.Rest of the poem
The priest denounces the boy as a heretic for his pondering, claiming him to be a "fiend" for questioning the logic and sensibility of divine worship, with support from the audience. The weeping child and his parents can do nothing as he is tied and burned at the stake.This occurs even though the child's age—he is a little boy, after all; he sees the world through the eyes of a child's innocence—should preclude him from comprehending the awful construing of his words as heresy. On the other hand, a reader might theorise that Blake intends to portray the child as precocious and with intentions to dissent from Church teaching—perhaps the Priest thinks so. However, the actual words applied by the author to the boy's speech offers very little toward this view; instead, it is the child's innocent candour that seems to inspire his words.
Background
It appears the author has drawn the “Priest” as not merely a parish priest but as metaphor for the hierarchical powers-that-be of the Church. Certainly Blake seems to hearken back to the time when the Church wielded almost unchecked powers throughout England to judge and destroy anyone it deemed intolerable in thought or behaviour.It has been said that Blake "wrote his poetry for the common man".