The Little Boy Found

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1789

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William Blake’s poem “The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young” was published in the same collection of poetry as “The Little Boy Found”: Songs of Innocence. The innocence and purity of childhood mirror one another in both poems, though “The Chimney Sweeper” has a darker tone than “The Little Boy Found.” While in the latter, the child is saved by God and returned to his mother, the former hints at the terrors faced by young children employed as chimney sweeps in the 18th century. The innocent young chimney sweeps can seemingly only be set free through death by God, where they can attain peace in heaven. In both poems, God is the savior of the children.

“The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow” by William Blake (1794)

This version of “The Chimney Sweeper” is a companion to the first poem listed here. While the version published in Songs of Innocence in 1789 portrays the innocence and purity of the children being maintained through death, the version in Songs of Experience takes a more critical approach towards society, the government, and religious institutions. While there is no God who comes to save the children from their misery, Blake’s social commentary blames these various institutions as the downfall of the innocent victims and for profiting from their labor and suffering.

“The Little Boy Lost” by William Blake (1794)

Blake published “The Little Boy Lost” in Songs of Experience after the companion piece “The Little Boy Found” appeared in Songs of Innocence (1789). While the Songs of Innocence version ends happily with the little boy returning to his mother via God's helping hand, the Songs of Experience version offers a different perspective. The poem shows a young boy falling behind and losing track of his father, possibly even intentionally misguided. God is not equated with the father in this poem as He is in the earlier version.

Further Literary Resources

"Blake’s 'Little Black Thing': Happiness and Injury in the Age of Slavery” by Lily Gurton-Wachter (2020)

Gurton-Wachter’s article questions why “the injured child calls himself happy” in the 1794 version of “The Chimney Sweeper.” By looking at how the poem portrays the “myth of the ‘happy slave,’” Gurton-Wachter analyzes how the poem “thwarts the reader’s tendency toward pity, critiquing a sentimental humanitarianism” that “dislodges happiness from consent and hints at a new job linked to agency, opacity, and resistance.”

“Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony in Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy’” by Alan Richardson (1990)

Richardson examines how Blake’s poem intersects with various societal and political issues, including:

colonialism, the antislavery movement, the question of religious education in the colonies, and its more subtle engagement with concerns over mass schooling and what Richard Altick calls the ‘literary crisis’ in England in the 1790s (p. 233).

Specifically, Richardson claims that the poem uses the structure of “maternal instruction” to convey its commentary.

“The Contraries’ Progression: Romantic Irony in the Introductory Poems of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience” by William Weber Wanderlinde (2021)

Weber Wanderline discusses how Blake utilizes irony in a selection of his poems. More specifically, Weber Wanderline uses the “concept of Romantic irony, developed by Friedrich Schlegel” to show how both Blake’s poetry and Schlegel’s theorization of Romantic irony are both “dialectical” in nature.