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“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.

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Songs That Interpolate A Little Boy Lost
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