Innocence In William Blake's The Little Black Boy

This poem focuses on the lynching of a African American male. The speaker of the poem appears to console a woman who appears to be distressed due to the events taking place. In the first four lines of stanza 1, the speaker says:

Throughout the poem, the author chooses simple diction. This makes the tone straightforward and blunt, like a black America who simply expresses himself instead of sermonizing about discrimination. Thereby, readers can accept the poem’s argument more easily. Furthermore, the author writes the poem mostly in long sentences to emphasize on short yet important sentences such as “That’s America.”, “Be we are. That’s true!”

A large portion of this poem is comparing the difference between black and white. In the poem it practically says “what if all the black is now white, and all the white is now black?”, then goes on to give some examples like “Black Presidents,

As a forerunner to the free-love movement, late eighteenth century poet, engraver, and artist, William Blake (1757-1827), has clear sexual overtones in many of his poems, and he layers his work with sexual double entendres and symbolism. Within the discussion of sexuality in his work Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake seems to take a complicated view of women. His speakers use constructs of contraries, specifically innocence/ experience and male/female. Of the latter sex, he experiments with the passive (dependent, docile, virtuous) and active (independent, evil, a threat to the masculine) female subjects. Blake’s use of personification specifically of nature and botany suggest the use of nature to discuss human society. In Songs

As time continues, the boy struggles with what to make of himself and his future. His musical aspirations begin to hold more weight in his decisions, but are still rather questionable. Whenever he seems to be making the steps to pave his future, he seems to continuously be redirected from his intended path. His inability to fully strive for a profession can be directly related to his inability to choose how he wants to be viewed, or rather who he wants to be viewed as, by society; he lacks the confidence to potentially make the “wrong decision.” The narrator becomes increasingly likely to make a career of music, and is greatly inspired by spirituals he hears at a church service. As he leaves to “settle down to work” (Johnson 133) , he witnesses a gruesome and cruel scene. A black man was to be hanged in town, but instead a white mob burns the black man alive. The narrator is terrified and scarred, committing to live his life as a white man. Shame is what the young boy now feels, for whether he lives as a white man, he is indeed a black man. Shame is responsible for the choice he made, because he wished not to be “identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals" (Johnson 139).

“The Little Black Boy” is about an African child who has come to term with his “blackness” and with divine being that created him God. The basis of the poem is built around the imagery of light and dark. In the first stanza the boy cries:“I am black but O! my soul is white” and “I am black as if bereav’d of light.” The black boy feels that his blackeness is a burden

In conclusion, the poem was used as a key to unlock some of the thoughts the negro had concerning Africa. The negro in this poem was a representative of all negroes during this time; their thoughts and the their feelings toward Africa. Cullen’s usage of the literary devices allow for an effective expression of the meaning of this poem. Poems are intensified language of experience, so the devices assured the connection of the reader to the poem and the experience. This applies to many issues in society today because as beautiful as our country is there are still dark clouds that cover the very essence of what the states once stood

Unfortunately, a question that many African Americans have to ask in childhood is "Mommy, what does nigger mean?," and the answer to this question depicts the racism that still thrives in America (345). Both Gloria Naylor’s "'Mommy, What Does "Nigger" Mean?'" and Countee Cullen's "Incident" demonstrate how a word like "nigger" destroys a child’s innocence and initiates the child into a world of racism.  Though the situations provoking the racial slur differ, the word "nigger" has the same effect on the young Naylor and the child in Cullen’s poem. A racist society devours the white children’s innocence, and, consequently, the white children embody

The Songs of Innocence poems first appeared in Blake’s 1784 novel, An Island in the Moon. In 1788, Blake began to compile in earnest, the collection of Songs of Innocence. And by 1789, this original volume of plates was complete. These poems are the products of the human mind in a state of innocence, imagination, and joy; natural euphoric feelings uninhibited or tainted by the outside world. Following the completion of the Songs of Innocence plates, Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and it is through this dilemma of good and evil and the suffering that he witnesses on the streets of London, that he begins composing Songs of Experience. This second volume serves as a response to Songs of

During the entirety of the poem the speaker uses the contrast of light and dark to illustrate the divide of Caucasian and Native American in her life and the specific wording she uses throughout shows that she is ends up moving away from her white heritage’s side. We first start to see that she is upset with her white roots when she states that her mother left her with “large white breasts” that weigh down her body. This statement is quite important. With the addition of the word “white” and the use of the words “weigh down” the narrator seems to be implying that it is a burden to carry the whiteness. Also, the narrator uses specific wording in this statement in order to disassociate herself from her own white leanings since she refers to her breasts as if they were her mothers and not her own. The next time she mentions the word white comes in the third stanza. The speaker devotes an entire line to the short phrase “and is white” almost as if to single out that word in the poem and signify that being white

Cullen utilizes imagery throughout the poem, to illuminate the racism African Americans endured and impact racism carries. The speaker in the poem is an eight year old in Baltimore. In the first stanza, Cullen describes the child as “heart-filled, head-filled with glee.” This image portrays the speaker as innocent and joyful. Then the speaker notices a boy staring at him, the speaker believes there’s little difference between them, that the kid “was no whit bigger.” The speaker gets a rude awakening after the boy “poked out his tongue.” A seemingly playful meaningless gesture is met with the boy calling the speaker “N****r.” Cullen contrasts these two experiences because it depicts how racism comes out of nowhere and effects those you wouldn’t expect. The last stanza, the speaker “saw the whole Baltimore. The image of seeing is not just visual, but a metaphor for the loss of innocence where the speaker now is exposed to the hate. Cullen masterfully uses imagery so that readers understand the incredible impact that words have, especially when used for hate.

Race plays a big part in this poem. He speaks on Harlem and its culture and this environment but also about mutual interest with people

William Blake focused on biblical images in the majority of his poetry and prose. Much of his well-known work comes from the two compilations Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems in these compilations reflect Blake's metamorphosis in thought as he grew from innocent to experienced. An example of this metamorphosis is the two poems The Divine Image and A Divine Image. The former preceded the latter by one year.

Ground-breaking, momentous, and a time of great struggle, the Industrial Revolution was famous for its innovations and infamous for the sobering reality it inflicted upon the standard family. Mid-18th century Britain brought poverty to everyday urban workers. With it, came an increase in child labor like never seen before. In order for a normal family to survive in the urban lifestyle, all members of a family had to work. This included children as young as four years to work as chimney sweepers, miners, and most popularized in 18th century Britain, factory workers. By the year 1800, children under the age of 14 in Britain’s factories accounted for 50% of the labor force (“Industrial Revolution, Child Labor”). Though the number continued to grow, all did not go unaccounted for. Romanticism, an effort opposite the movement, gave recognition to the emotional conflicts overlooked. Romanticism shed light on the daily struggles of the everyday man, woman, and the most neglected up until that period of time, the child. Throughout history, others have written about childhood, but Romantic poets began to question what it meant to be a child. The question, though not answered directly, later became revealed in their works where it exposed their belief systems. The role of the child in British Romantic Poetry represents the early life of Romantic poets, and the qualities they possessed in childhood.