A Short Note On The Last Lines Of William Blake’s Poem The Little Black Boy

 On that last line, I guess the assumption is that the little white boy, going in, will think of the little black boy as the other, or an other. 

The very last line follows a sequence of lines when, in the little black boy’s projection of what will be, of what he has learned from his mother, they are free from the clouds of their skins, black and white, and they then frolic like lambs—white things: they “joy.”

But the little white boy even then is still immersed in his innocence. He needs the little black boy to shade him until he can bear God’s heat such that he can get to bear the heat, be closer to God, lean in joy upon their “fathers knee.” 

Then the little black boy, seeming to replicate his mother’s nurturing of him, will stroke the little white boy’s silver hair, in a continued loving and generous way. So that then, the little white boy, now having accommodated experience, which is to say, the heat, will see that the little black boy is just like him and will then love the little black boy. 

So, on this way of seeing it, the little white boy is being brought along to understand the holy truth of their essential sameness and then to love the little black boy all thanks to the little black boy’s loving, nurturing generosity.

What strikes me, though, following the sequence of the these concluding lines this way, is that they are shot through with terribly biting bitterness compared to the unstinting reality then of slavery and whites’ view of blacks as inferior to them. Which also lays in heart breaking poignancy along with the bitter irony given what the little black boy imagines as against the impregnably harsh reality of things.