The Little Black Boy

Here's a poem that broke my heart and influenced me from an early age:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O! my soul is white;

White as an angel is the English child: 

But I am black as if bereav'd of light.

 

My mother taught me underneath a tree 

And sitting down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissed me,

And pointing to the east began to say: 

Look on the rising sun: there God does live 

And gives his light, and gives his heat away. 

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love, 

And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face

Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear 

The cloud will vanish, we shall hear his voice 

Saying: Come out from the grove my love and care,

And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

Thus did my mother say and kissed me, 

And thus I say to little English boy: 

When I from black and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: 

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear, 

To lean in joy upon our father's knee. 

And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him, and he will then love me.

 

By William Blake

*

I've always tended to think of Blake as an ethereal creature, solitary and withdrawn, lost in his poetry and imagery. Actually, according to history, he was a prickly, pugnacious rebel, of the earth and earthy. Friend of rebels, including Mary Wollstonecraft, preaching for women's rights and opposing institutions such as organized religion.