Discussion of "The Little Boy Lost" begins with Joseph Wicksteed's 1932 letter to the editor of TLS which addresses the similarities between C.G. Salzmann's Elements of Morality (translated from the German by Mary Wollstonecraft and engraved by Blake) and "The Little Boy Lost." Wicksteed argues that Blake subverts Salzmann's lesson "that there is a reason based in experience for all the moral precepts of the grown-up world," by exposing adults' false leads (112) and valorizing children's perspective.
After a lapse of nearly thirty years, "The Little Boy Lost" re- appears as an object for critical discussion in Robert Gleckner's The Piper and the Bard (1959). Gleckner distinguishes "The Little Boy Lost" from "The Little Boy Found." The former poem tells the story of a boy searching for a father/rationalist figure. At the poem's end, Gleckner argues, the boy "reverts to innocence, to the care of the mother, the angels, and Christ" (100)--although none of these figures appear literally in the poem. In the latter poem, another boy appears to be lost, again only to be returned to his mother, for "in innocence one cannot really be lost" (102). Hazard Hirsch challenges Gleckner's and Adams's interpretations, reading "The Little Boy Lost" as "a poignantly sad little poem" about a child unable to understand his father's death (187). But if "The Little Boy Lost" is sad, "The Little Boy Found" may be a "satire against an impersonal God....[or an expression of divine love] in which both God and the mother express the parenthood of God and the sacramental nature of guardianship" (187-88).
D.G. Gilham argues that "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found" are deliberately, deceptively simple poems which emphasize the gulf between the reader's experienced mind and the eponymous character's innocent one. While the appearance of God in the guise of the boy's father bewilders readers, the boy simply, completely accepts the vision. Building on Wicksteed's assessment of the similarities between Salzmann's work and Blake's--but not giving the critic credit--Gilham notes that the German writer's stories herald self-interest and repressive social virtues while Blake's champion children's valorization of affectionate relationships (102).
1967 saw a flurry of discussion about the two poems, showing scholarship at its most offensive or humorous. Partially in response to Gleckner, Connolly and Levine argued in PMLA that "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found" must be read together, and also in the context of their illustrations. Innocents are saved by earthly or heavenly guardians who lead them past danger. In these poems the mother assumes "the protective role after [abandonment by the father and] divine intervention" (258). Although the boy remains in darkness at the end of the first poem, in the second, the reunion with his mother stresses "the sanctity of the mother-son relationship and the protection of innocence from destructive experience" (264). John Grant responded with a ridiculously vitriolic attack on Connolly and Levine's interpretation of the engravings in the Blake Newsletter. The guide is neither Christ nor female but God appearing as the boy's father, "not like the Savior who is depicted in Church" (9). In the next edition of the Blake Newsletter, Connolly and Levine defended their scholarship from Grant's attack and stated that the guardian "is clearly a female figure....[The engraving] shows the child and a haloed mother after the restoration by God" (17). Grant replied with further condemnation of Connolly and Levine's research. After a patronizing critique, Grant explains the figure cannot be female because Blake "never gave this character an unmistakably female face, as he could easily have done" (32). Grant asks why Blake has God look maternal only to leave the question unanswered. (Un- )Fortunately, Connolly and Levine do not reply. To a less contentious degree, J.G. Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, critics left the two poems alone for over ten years. In Reading Blake's Songs, Zachary Leader brings up the illustration of "The Little Boy Found" as a provocative issue but does not pursue it. Apparently the critic is unsure how to read the androgyny of the figure guiding the boy, suggesting the child "sees the watchful benevolence of both parents in the divinity of the father" (50). Ultimately, Leader refuses to investigate the implications of the engraving, claiming instead that the plate is an artistic failure which attempts "to make too many points, answer too many questions" (50). Stephen Carr's reading picks up where Leader's leaves off, acknowledging that in some editions of the Songs, the guardian is explicitly male and Christ-like (with a halo and beard) while in others, s/he appears female (with breasts and flowing hair). Carr points out that the earlier critical debate did not examine the significance of this ambiguity, instead focusing myopically on particular interpretations of the page and not on the possibility of a multiplicity of meanings. Other variations of the illustration include the child shying away from the guardian who appears menacing. Thus, variation "invites alternative and even antithetical readings that might, for example, stress the dangers of being led by either a 'wand'ring light' or a seemingly benevolent hand" (195). "The Little Boy Found" exemplifies Blake's printmaking as process or re-vision. Carr's article represents a paradigmatic shift in Blake criticism; unfortunately later critics continue to follow rather conventional interpretations of the poems.
Stanley Songs of Innocence version. In the former, all the boy "has to do is weep and the mist lifts: a touching conclusion to satisfy all" (69). The later version, illustrated and followed by "The Little Boy Found" moves the child from after-dinner entertainment to "a living creature of the imagination" (70). The light of "The Little Boy Lost" transforms "into the radiant relationship between God and the little boy in the next design" (70). The illustrations prefigure those in Songs of Experience and take the reader "towards the expectation of spiritual loss" (71). David Lindsay follows this reading with a brief critical discussion of the movement of "The Little Boy Lost" from "Island" to Songs, focusing on Erdman's analysis that the poem is not a satire in the later version as the anapests and mockery have been removed (22).
John Hampsey's study focuses on rebellious children from "Tiriel" to Jerusalem. Bondage "is the most singular aspect of Blake's State of Experience, and it is precisely what the Desire of Innocence struggles against" (20). "The Little Boy Lost" warns the child that his father and God are both tyrants and cold. The mother is an ineffectual figure "whereas the father is ever present with his law in hand and ready to wield his power" (27). Although Margaret Storch does not explicitly address Hampsey, her reading offers a fascinating alternative to his reading--and indeed to all of the readings by the male critics. Storch suggests the poems are a "version of the powerful mother's castrating and abstracting effects upon the boy through her destruction of the strong figure" (38). The boy's pursuit of the elusive father figure is a manifestation of his anxiety of annihilation. The figure is idealized, "formed out of the boy's desperate anxiety to preserve the good object," yet the child (and his father) must return to the mother, the original source of anguish (38). Nelson Hilton suggests an interesting variation of this idea in a brief note in his Literal Imagination: "As the child is wet with the dew of his material birth, so must he be reborn in the tears of his separateness and need, becoming a son of loss" (47).
--Katherine Montwieler (November 1995)
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