Joseph Wicksteed reads "A Little Boy Lost" as "a fierce indictment of man's interference with the growing mind" (178). Yet although terrifying a child out of freedom of thought is "nothing less than spiritual murder," Blake's sympathies are not entirely with the child's thought (178-9). Indeed, Wicksteed understands the striking aspect of the poem to be that "Blake's own sympathies are only partially with the views expressed though entirely with the individuals" (178). More sympathetic to the boy's point of view, Robert Gleckner understands "A Little Boy Lost" to have recognized "his self as divine" and that although such a recognition "is admirable and right in Blake's eyes[, it is] abhorrent, of course, to the priest and the child's parents" (253). The boy's speech about love indicates the child's innocence. Yet the priest believes "the child is judging the religious mystery, God, whereas it is actually reason that judges the child, and metes out punishment according to the law reason created" (253). The child is burned as a heretic because "he did not conform to the laws of behavior and the rules of religion and love" (254). Gleckner notes that Blake omitted the lines "The mother followd weeping aloud /O that I such a fiend should bear" "because they were too blatant a condemnation of the mother," although, he maintains, the parents are implicitly criticized as severely as the Church is.

Hazard Adams reads the poem as full of inversions: the "father spoken to is the false father or priest, not the true parent; the child's argument is really a plea for universal love rather than for self love; the priest objects because the child insults mystery with reason, when actually the child is not reasoning but acting reasonably on the basis of his innocent feelings" (270). Adams reads the child as loving all things, including himself, equally -- an attitude which the priest cannot understand. Blake, a prophetic critic, Adams suggests, expresses his outrage in the last line of the poem which is locked into the poem's structure, but also "stands alone as a grammatically independent final statement" (271).

E.D. Hirsch understands "A Little Boy Lost" to be "a contrary poem that [is] neither a parody nor a direct satire of ['The Little Boy Lost'], but rather a vigorous and bitter counterweight to the spirit, not the theme of its gentle pieties" (276). The poem also develops Blake's idea about the humanness of God and "the humanization of all reality" (276). The little boy's affirmation of love among all things in the universe is an expression of "the gentler, Wordsworthian side of Blake's naturalism" (278). The priest must burn the child "whose antihypocritical and naturalistic religion is, like the religion of the early martyrs, subversive of the established order" (279). D.G. Gilham says the boy "questions the doctrine of love which has...become the vehicle of dogmatism and mystery" (84). The child is led away from "a genuine knowledge of what [God and love] might be, as explanations [of them] are multiplied. A doctrine of love ousts the exercise of love" (89). This little boy's questions are paraphrases of "something he has heard, without being aware of the implications of his words" (86). Gilham reads the poem as Blake's response to Pope's and Locke's suggestion that man can know only part of the universe, suggesting instead that for the little boy "the universe, for [him], is sufficiently contained in [him]. Nothing is unknown. Any true knowledge of God is to be got from a full awareness as a human being" (86). The priest punishes the boy for "ignorantly extolling the reasoning powers, yet the real crime for which he is made to suffer is that, in doing so, he gives too accurate a description of the priest's own methods" (88). The final question of the poem underscores the absurdity of the priest's actions.

Stephen Cox's 1981 article, "Adventures of 'A Little Boy Lost': Blake and the Process of Interpretation," begins with a trajectory of the critical reception of the poem (starting with Swinburne's "William Blake: A Critical Essay" and moving through the twentieth century). Later critics have attempted "to neutralize the Little Boy's apparent argument for self-love" as they often read the boy as a mouthpiece for the poet (305), although others (like Wicksteed) have recognized Blake's subtlety--that the poet might find "the rationalism of the boy 'obnoxious'..[but still] worthy of sympathy" (307). Most readers have viewed the poem "as an invitation to such emotions as pity, tolerance, or universal love, and not as a seriously intended argument for the primacy of self" (308). The poem, Cox asserts, is an ironic sequel to "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found" where a boy is murdered for asserting his right to a mild form of egoism: "God becomes an excuse for society's destruction of an independent spirit" (302). Yet critics are often unwilling to accept the Little Boy's apology for self-love "as an expression of Blake's own ideas" (313). As critics, we cannot ignore this potentially controversial issue, but must read on a number of different levels in order to keep the issues all poems (and this one in particular) raise "from final and deadening resolution" (315). Diana Hume George reads "A Little Boy Lost" as containing "two intergenerational confrontations, the first between father and son, the second between father and priest" (106-07). Since the son does not defer to his father and "is not a product of perfected superego development, he sees all of the things that normally have become repressed" (107). The boy recognizes that his "love" for his father is the result of his "dependency in the family situation" (107). The priest's entrance at this particular moment indicates that the boy "has uncovered the 'mystery' of organized religion as well. God is the father writ large, and love for God is the product of fear and dependence; thus the priest takes over the function of punishment which normally devolves on the father" (108). George concludes that the priest represents the father's father and that "the confrontation between father and son in the first verse is a reenactment of the father's own confrontation, which he desired but never enacted" (81). The boy's death may be literal or a "threatened death in the form of the castration complex, followed by enforced formation of the boy's own superego" which, for Blake, "is equivalent to murder" (81). Margaret Katherine Montweiler (December 1995)

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Cox, Stephen D.. "Adventures of 'A Little boy Lost': Blake and the Process of Interpretation." Criticism. 23 (1981): 301-16.

George, Diana Hume. Blake and Freud. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

Gilham, D.G.. Blake's Contrary States: The "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" as Dramatic Poems. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1966.

Gleckner, Robert F.. The Piper and the Bard, A Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959.

Hirsch, E.D.. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Storch, Margaret. Sons and Adversaries: Women in William Blake and D.H. Lawrence. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

Wicksteed, Joseph H.. Blake's Innocence and Experience: A Study of the Songs and Manuscripts. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1928.