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Critics on ‘The Little Black Boy’
S. Foster Damon calls the poem "primarily moralistic," and he also asserts that its final stanza suggests that Blake did not believe in the equality of the races. Damon also identifies a possible source for the poem, Isaac Watts' Horae Lyricae , a source to which later commentators will return.
In his 1936 article, Richard Kain discusses a variety of poems contemporaneous with Blake's "The Little Black Boy." Although he mentions Blake's poem only in passing, his comment is worth recording: without qualification of any kind, Kain calls "The Little Black Boy" "the finest poem of the abolitionist movement"
The black boy imagines himself superior to the white boy in heaven, but he only craves this superiority in order to gain the white child's love. Also published in 1963 was Harold Bloom's book, in which "The Little Black Boy" is called "the best poem in the series," and he also remarks that it is "one of the most deliberately misleading and ironic of all Blake's lyrics" (48). Bloom argues that the little black boy accepts all that he is told by his mother as truth, and that the poem thus demonstrates the "inadequacy of Innocence, of the natural context, to sustain any idealizations whatsoever"
Manlove's 1977 article discusses "The Little Black Boy" in conjunction with one of the Songs of Experience --"The Fly"--and his point is that the boundaries between the "two contrary states of the human soul" are not impermeable; rather, the "contrary states can be as much within individual poems as between labelled groups" (117). Within this reading, Manlove's view of "The Little Black Boy" is that it is a poem that "is not about innocence, but about a deluded and self-deluding innocence which refuses to face its pain, and in so doing enacts hypocrisies attributable to Experience".
In the 1990’s Ngugi Wa Thiong'o argued that, however sympathetic these writers may be, their efforts often represent a desire to smooth over the realities of racial conflict. For example, he sees in the ending of Blake's "The Little Black Boy" "the white liberal's dream of a day when black and white can love one another without going through the agony of violent reckoning"
After commenting that, in several of Blake's Songs , he "systematically presents the speech of children as being characterized by compiled conjunctions", Linkin argues that the mother and child in "The Little Black Boy" use just such speech, "implicating both mother and son in using childish language to construct a willfully, wishfully alternative version of reality". Linkin also argues that the poem "demonstrates a breakdown between questions and answers: although the mother explains why she and her son have black skin, the little black boy really wants to know why skin colour is a source of hatred