Comparison of The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found

Comparison of The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found

The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found are two poems that are

quite different to each other, in the aspect of language used, themes

and ideas, and imagery. I shall look at each poem in detail in this

essay, along with the different ideas that I get from them.

In The Little Boy Lost, the first stanza of the poem gives the reader

images of a father ignoring, possibly abandoning his son and walking

away from him. This stanza is written in first person, to show us how

confused the boy is. The language the boy uses in the first stanza

could tell us that his father is walking away from him completely

out-of-the-blue, and he does not know what he has done and does not

know why his father is leaving him. In the second stanza, we can truly

see the effects of a little boy being lost. The images we get are of a

young child, alone, with “no father there”, and “wet with dew”. And

the language in the second stanza is the typical language describing a

lost child, scared and crying. But, the “vapour” in line 4 of the

second stanza could symbolise a lost and confused child going towards

a light, trying anything to get out of the darkness, and the feeling

of loneliness.

However, in The Little Boy Found, we can tell from the title that this

poem will be more optimistic and positive. In the first stanza, in the

first two lines, the imagery hasn’t changed from A Little Boy Lost, a

child lost and crying. But, in the last two lines of this stanza, God

appears before him. This contrasts to The Little Boy Lost because his

father abandoned him, but God, the “Father” to all living things comes

to find him. And the introduction of the colour white in the darkness

extends the idea that this poem will be more optimistic than The

Little Boy Lost. In the second stanza, God takes the child back to his

mother. The child’s mother is oblivious to her child being taken away,