A Little Boy Lost Lyrics
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.
‘And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.’
The Priest sat by and heard the child;
In trembling zeal he seized his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired his priestly care.
And standing on the altar high,
‘Lo, what a fiend is here!’ said he:
‘One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery.’
The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain,
And burned him in a holy place
Where many had been burned before;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion’s shore?
About
“A Little Boy Lost” begins as a meditation on love, and the distinction between love of self and ‘thought’. The address to ‘father’ could be the child’s earthly father or it could refer to the Heavenly Father and form a prayer. The speaker, a child, is overheard by a priest, who interprets his prayer as blasphemy. At this point on the poem becomes the terrifying tale of the boy’s punishment at the hands of a blinkered, vindictive clergyman.
Although it is unlikely that this would have happened in England in Blake’s day, Blake strongly disapproved of a religious system that denounced human reason as a means to reach spiritual truth, and suppressed human imagination.
While the actual burning alive of a blasphemous boy is unlikely to have taken place, the poet witnessed abuse by those with religious authority. Blake touches on the harshness of the religious establishment in his poems London, and The Garden of Love. He questions a religious system that denounces a child’s questions; moreover, addressing them to God, rather than the earthly church with its powerful priests, was regarded as is even worse. Blake sought to relate to God outside the confines of the repressive and self-serving religious institutions of his day.
Structure
The poem comprises six four-lined stanzas known as quatrains, each with an ABCB rhyming pattern. The metrical rhythm is iambic tetrameter, that is four metrical iambs or feet per line, each iamb made up of one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable.
Language and Imagery
The child is a metaphor for the ordinary person who asks questions about spiritual issues, while the capitalised ‘Priest’ is a metaphor for the harsh authority of the Church. Though the meaning is symbolic, the language throughout is concise, spare and easy to understand.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
- 9.The Fly
- 10.The Angel
- 11.The Tyger
- 13.Ah! Sun-flower
- 14.The Lilly
- 17.London
- 19.Infant Sorrow
- 20.A Poison Tree
- 21.A Little Boy Lost
- 24.A Cradle Song
- 25.The Schoolboy
- 26.To Tirzah