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William BlakeThe Little Boy Found
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1789A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Socio-Historical Context
Blake published Songs of Innocence, the volume preceding Songs of Experience, in 1789. Songs of Innocence was the volume in which “The Little Boy Found” initially appeared. This was also the year that the French Revolution began, causing social upheavals and philosophical questions about societal structure, human rights, the right to rule, and the role of the masses. Blake maintained friendships with a number of radical writers and thinkers who would have had extreme, liberal views regarding the French Revolution, political power, and individual freedom. Deemed a political radical himself, Blake would have associated with the likes of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. The social turmoil at the time Songs of Innocence appeared parallels Blake's poem “The Little Boy Found.” In the poem, the idyllic nuclear family initially falls apart: Father, mother, and child are separated. The structure of the family is thrown into question, just as the hierarchy of society was under scrutiny during the French Revolution.
In the end, the speaker withholds complete closure: Readers are left seeing the mother search for her child rather than a “happy” ending. Similarly, to the suspended state of the poem, society lacked closure and clarity during the tumult of the Revolution. Seeing the destruction of which humans are capable and reading new societal theories regarding the French Revolution helped shape Blake’s views, with scholars arguing that Blake developed a continued disillusion with the political systems of his time. While Blake does not offer a resolution for the social and structural issues in “The Little Boy Found”—other than the saving power of God—the poem reflects the spirit of the time in which Blake wrote.
Literary Context
The Romantic Period of British Literature was a time of literary introspection and experimentation. The writers of this particular period did not call or consider themselves “Romantics”; rather, this term was administered to them. Academics in the 1900s attributed various commonalities to this collection of writers. These authors were grouped into various “schools,” including the “Lake School,” the “Cockney School,” and the “Satanic School.” Writers of this literary period used the various revolutions and radical social change taking place around them—of the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, or the French Revolution—to inspire their work. Common attributes of Romantic works include a focus on the common/rustic man, a focus on the individual, a preoccupation with emotional/mental/imaginative states, an interest in the supernatural, and a devotion to writing about the natural world.
Though a good portion of writers from this period utilized a number of these themes in their writing, that isn’t to say all of them always did. The Romantic Period likewise sought to question who can be regarded as a poet, and for whom poetry is written. William Wordsworth, one of the other “Big 6” Romantic poets, made poetry slightly more accessible by using the language of “the common man.” As Wordsworth emphasized in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798), poetry was also supposed to be, in his view, the “spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility.” This spontaneity of expression assisted writers in making “similar declarations of artistic independence from inherited precepts, sometimes in a manner involving, paradoxically, a turn from the here-and-now toward a remote, preliterate and primitive past” (The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, vol. D, 8th ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2005, p. 10). Written within this literary movement, Blake’s “The Little Boy Found” clearly includes a focus on mental states and emotion—traits indicative of Romantic literature.
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