The Little Boy Lost
Father, father, where are you going
O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost,
The night was dark no father was there
The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep, & the child did weep
And away the vapour flew.
O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost,
The night was dark no father was there
The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep, & the child did weep
And away the vapour flew.
Form
Two stanzas.
Commentary
This well-known poem from Blake’s Songs of Innocence portrays a boy calling out to his father, whose absence leaves the child alone and lost. While the poem literally describes the child losing his way, its undertone reveals the child’s emotional relationship with his father. The relationship between father and son is implied as such that the son cares for his father, but is also aware that there is between them a level of disconnection: in the line “Speak father, speak to your little boy”, the words “your little boy” as opposed to “your son” are used, indicating that the father sees the child perhaps less fondly than how the son sees his father; the child still addresses his father as “father”, however, revealing that the child loves and respects his parent. The father’s lack of complete love for his child is also revealed in how the father loses the child by walking too fast, which can be taken to mean that the father during this course of events is preoccupied, and forgets his child, who is then lost. This shows a lack of concern on the part of the father for his child. In the next stanza, the father is no longer addressed by the child at all, but is referred to as such: “The night was dark, no father was there”. This implies that the article preceding “father” in the second line would no longer be the article “the”, but the article “a”. This change in sentence structure can be interpreted as the child’s subconscious disownment of his father for his father’s apparent disownment of the child by losing him: his father is no longer a specific individual, but could be the father of any child, and is no longer present in the literal sense or in the life of the child. Taken in an emotional sense, this reveals the disconnect in the relationship between father and son. However, though it would appear that this disengagement would be mutual, the son still laments losing his father, seen in this line from stanza two: “The mire was deep & the child did weep”. The lines “O do not walk so fast” and “Or else I shall be lost” hint at a rhyme, but when executed do not result in a rhyme. This indicates that the child’s detachment from the father also breaks the structure of the poem and thus the structure of the reality defined in the poem, which is only mended when the child accepts the father’s disownment of him, and reacts by affirming the death of their relationship. The corresponding lines in the second stanza (“The child was wet with dew” and “And away the vapour flew”) do rhyme, and thus structure and reality are recomposed. What is interesting about this phenomenon is that the necessity of structure to reality is in fact antithetical to Blake’s ideology, which is why in the poem’s counterpart, “The Little Boy Found”, this idea is refuted: god appears and saves the boy, and there is no interruption to the structure, even though the appearance of god is disruptive to reality. This creates a loop wherein god’s ability to reform the structure affirms reality itself as well as the reality of his appearance, implying that structure is subject to eternal manipulation and thus inferior to it.