The Little Black Boy

My first instinct was to read the stark black and white in the first (1789) edition as a crass translation of subject matter into visuality. But in fact the first edition illustration might actually complicate the poem, might contribute to its subject matter and become part of the subject matter, interacting with the “text” in a way that produces, at the very least, tension. Because while the words of the poem advocate for a heaven in which the “black” boy becomes white and benevolently shades and strokes the silver-haired white boy, the visual facts of the page display a tension between white and black where neither color wins out and both maintain a strict separation. The blackness of the page is not in the act of becoming the whiteness of the page; the boundaries adhere. In later editions these boundaries are safely nullified by the use of the full color spectrum and a technique of indeterminacy in which colors softly approach or bleed into one another. While colors maintain their distinctness, the political or spiritual urgency and starkness from the first edition is gone. The visual relationship to the text in later editions is one of confirmation and similitude rather than complexity, tension, or further content. And I guess that’s my basic argument: that the nature of the relationship between text and image in the first edition actually adds content or subject matter to the poem. Other black and white plates would mean other things in the context of their text; the relations are interdependent and change with their contexts—even as in other poems themes of black and white are just as malleable; like the blackened bodies of the chimney sweeps that whiten after washing or that are clothed in black death clothes rather than their blackness inhering.

Further, it might be interesting to explore how the stark black and white schema recalls both mass-printed text (newspaper, trade books, etc) and also woodcuts and other printmaking techniques. I’m trying to get to something that isn’t a simple “comparison” between, for example, printmaking and the first edition print page of “Black Boy,” but rather that the text-image itself is participating in a larger text-image dialogue along with printmaking or other graphic arts. I haven’t fully theorized what that that dialogue might be—except perhaps to mention Blake’s rejection of Burke and the Romantic animus toward print, and Blake’s own professional interests that might lead to a ready engagement of printing technique with text-image. I’m reminded of the quote from the “Picture Theory reading about the “Introduction” poem to Songs of Innocence: “The piper sees no difference between the creation of a unique, handwritten manuscript and the creation of a text that can be universally disseminated.”