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Key Ideas about William Blakes Poem- A Little Boy Lost
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A Little Boy Lost
Synopsis: A child asks his father about his thoughts on love and they contradict the church teaching.
A priest hears the child and drags him off, which everyone interprets as his zeal and care for the
welfare of the child. He accuses the boy publicly at the altar of being a devil because he uses his
reason to judge the mysteries of faith. The child's weeping cannot be heard and the parents' grief is
ineffective. The child is stripped, chained and burnt at the stake as a heretic. The speaker expresses
his disbelief that this could happen in England.
What was the church teaching?
Christians urged to love other in the same way that they care for themselves
According to the bibles human beings can know God who is greater than any human mind.
The Bible frequently enjoins believers to ‘love one another' in the same way that Jesus loved
humanity (for which he ‘laid down his life')
What does the child question?
Whether it is possible to love someone more than yourself.
Whether it is possible for the human mind to know something greater than itself.
the boy feels he cannot love beyond his natural capacity for love, just like a little bird which
only has the capacity to eat crumbs (and, by implication, not huge slices of bread).
What is heresy?
Belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.
Themes
Parental care and authority, the perception of children, issues of faith, connections with
God.
Key Ideas
The opening of the poem puzzles readers as it denies that selfless love is possible.
The child’s opinion tally with the idea that Human beings ‘can have no idea of anything
greater than Man' (perhaps because God was within each person, or because of their
limited, fallen perspective)
Using the language of quantity in speaking of love (‘more'), as though it were a commodity,
should be questioned. The child challenges the divided self's view of love which sees it as
something to be possessed, weighed out and measured.
The child challenges the view that religion is a mystery and just should be accepted as this.
He urges to explore it.
The fallen mind has produced the image of a tyrannical God who demands obedience and
human sacrifice. It is this perception which results in the persecution of the child.
The cherishing of free speech.
The steeping of vulnerability as expressed by constant reference to “little engineers a vast
amount of empathy.
The denial of following the status quo that is imprinted upon them by authority figures. The
insistence of the child in stanza 1 on one level seems to be a statement of self-love as the
primal feeling alongside the impossibility of the human mind to understand anything beyond
its own level of thought. Yet in the context of the stanza 2 it is subverted.
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