William Blake's The Little Black Boy

Racism has always been an underlying issue in our country. In William Blake’s poem The Little Black Boy he adds to the controversy by showing us the equality in us all. In the poem there is mention of the darkness of the ones child’s skin but his soul is white. In the first stanza Blake wrote:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O my soul is white

White as an angel is the English child:

But I am black as if bereav’d light.

It was my interpretation that the color white was chosen for two reasons. The first: White has always represented purity or innocence. This child no matter what he looked like on the outside was an innocent soul given to his mother by God. The second reason: to me is the one that caused the controversy, it represents that no matter what our differences here on Earth are, we are all equal in the eyes of God. Imagine the outcry from the South when this poem was published. Blake wrote and chose to publish this poem while slavery was still legal in this country. Later on in the poem the mother makes mention for the boy to look to where God lives and the light and warmth he gives. The 3^rd stanza reads:

Look on the rising sun: there God does live

And gives his light and gives his heat away

 And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning joy in the noon day

To me the light, or heat, he gives us is acceptance unto him. Whoever sees the lights and accepts it will have life ever after with him. When you enter into his house there are no barriers that separate us. No segregation between races, only peace and harmony. Slavery is a stain on our country that we will always have to carry as citizens, but this poem showed us that some did not feel the same about the bigotry of the nation. The readers and the author himself believed that all men truly were created equal in the eyes of God, and to many of us those eyes are the ones we really care about.