Lyric Poem · Sad
A Little Boy Lost
"Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.
"And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door."
The Priest sat by and heard the child;
In trembling zeal he seized his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired the priestly care.
And standing on the altar high,
"Lo, what a fiend is here!" said he:
"One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery."
The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain,
And burned him in a holy place
Where many had been burned before;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such thing done on Albion's shore?
Full-text availability follows the United States display decision recorded below; status can differ elsewhere.
“A Little Boy Lost” by William Blake — quilloak.com/poems/a-little-boy-lost
Quick facts
- Poem
- A Little Boy Lost
- Poet
- William Blake
- Length
- 24 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- Sad, Love, Childhood
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 24 lines · 6 quatrains
- End rhyme
- ABCB in 83% of the stanzas — ballad rhyme — only lines 2 and 4 chime. The remaining stanzas vary, often through slant rhyme.
- Line length
- Consistent with long metre. Four eight-syllable lines (8.8.8.8), the hymn stanza's longer cousin.
- Refrains
- “The weeping parents wept in vain:”“The weeping parents wept in vain.”Repeated lines act as the poem's hinge or drumbeat.
Want the rules this form is measured against? Read what makes a lyric poem, or run your own draft through the form checker to see the same measurements on your lines. How we measure · Report a mistake
Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.
- Author record
- William Blake1757–1827
- Source record
- PoetryDBA Little Boy Lost by william-blake, PoetryDB transcription
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 7c2d30163f43511d…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.
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