In the poem The Little Black Boy, poet, William Blake expresses the theme of the insidious effects of racism. With the speaker of the poem being a black boy who conveys his message to an English boy in hope to show him that they are equals. The speaker’s use of imagery, language, and style help portray his emotions to the boy.
William Blake employs a great variety of metaphors. For instance, in the line “Look on the rising sun: there God does live and gives his light, and gives his heat away.” God is compared to the sun, a phenomena that provides people with light, warmth and hope. Scholars at academon website refer to the “light as a conceptual metaphor for knowledge which lies in the human mind”. With the image of the boy’s sun-burnt face is a sign of his desire to be educated and become a human being just like the whites, something the whites didn’t want. The reason for this also happens to be when the poem was written through this type of time period, where africans living in the US were deprived of the opportunity to receive appropriate education as a result of racial segregation. Another metaphor is in the line: “And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.” Africans in this line are compared to a cloud; the white men believed that they were superior to the blacks, that the blacks were not capable enough to receive such knowledge. With reference to the poem’s imagery, the devices present in this literary work mostly appeal to the reader’s visual and tactile senses. The black and white colors used in the description serve not only to differentiate the races, but also to impact the child’s understanding of good and bad. For example, the line – “And I am black, but Oh! my soul is white,” shows us a great degree of the boy’s awareness and will to show his kindness and knowledge. The little child stands here for the whole nation, being vulnerable under the rule of those who are not tolerant of people who simply have a...