William Blake, my hero

I first read/heard this poem by William Blake when I was a freshman in college in an English lit survey. The professor came in to class and took attendance, started to read this aloud and then started to weep and left the class.

This was the same guy who believed that JFK's assassination was perpetrated by white supremacists. On the day of my first final in college, the day JFK was shot, shortly after lunch, I trudged in shock to his class. He glowered at us, said, "You all helped pull the trigger," and handed out the final. I don't know how I did, probably a B.

He firmly believed, when he heard about the assassination that it was racially motivated. That was the day I lost my innocence, at least as far as the world being a benign place to live. How fitting that this poem is from Blake's Songs of Innocence.

The Little Black Boy

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh! my soul is white.
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black as if bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say:

"Look on the rising sun, - there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away;
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

For when our souls have learned the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear his voice
Saying: `Come out from the grove, my love and care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice!' "

Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy:
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.

This poem (and Ben Johnson's "On My First Son," an incomplete sonnet) still makes me weep too. As always, feel free to comment below.