William Blake Poetry
William Blake Poetry“The Little Boy Lost”
“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.” 4
The night was dark, no father was there;
The child was wet with dew;
The mire was deep, and the child did weep,
And away the vapour flew. 8
“The Little Boy Found”
The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wand’ring light,
Began to cry; but God, ever nigh,
Appear’d like his father in white. 4
He kissed the child and by the hand led
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, thro’ the lonely dale,
Her little boy weeping in sought. 8
William Blake was a large part in bringing the Romantic movement to poetry, and was also a social critic of his own time and considered himself a prophet of times to come. His social criticism is representative of his own country and era as well as in our own time. He wrote about the disapproval of change during an intense time of social and political change in England. Blake had a Puritan view on Christianity, he considered the Enlightenment a “materialistic philosophy” (Drabble, 105). In William Blake’s poems, “The Little Boy Lost” and “The Little Boy Found”, he uses parallelism to compare a boy who has found God to a boy who is lost without God; however the difference between these two poems are in rhythm and in tone.
William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 as the third of five children to a London hosier. Because of his father’s profession and their lower middle class status, he was raised in the...
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