Back to: Karnataka Board Class 10th Notes
Table of Contents
Introduction
The poem “The Blind Boy” written by Colley Cibber describes the experiences of a young boy who cannot see with his eyes. The poet tries to express what a blind boy feels and what the world and worldly things are for him. The poem has been divided into five stanzas having four lines each. The rhyme scheme of the poem is abab cdcd. There are no deep words and meanings. The lines are quite simple.
Poem
Stanza 1
The speaker in the poem is a blind boy himself. He asks the others to help him understand what is “Light” which he has often heard others saying. It is something which he can never enjoy. Nor all those blessings which light has.
Stanza 2
In stanza 2, the blind says that people often “talk of wondrous things” which they see with their eyes. People often say that “the sun shines bright”. However, he can only feel it (which is warm). But he wonders how the sun can “make it day or night. The lines are quite profound and express a blind person’s unfamiliarity with the day and dark as everything is dark for him.
Stanza 3
The blind boy says that, unlike others, he himself makes his day as well as night. When he sleeps, it is a night for him and whenever he awakes and plays, it becomes his day. The day never goes away until he keeps awake or playing. In these lines for the first time, the blind boy seems to be proud of his blindness rather than sorry for his condition.
Stanza 4
The blind boy says that he feels quite sorrowful and grieved when he listens to the cries of others for his miserable condition (It is through their mourns, he comes to know that he is miserable). According to him, he has patience and hence will be able to bear a loss (of his eyesight) which he can never imagine or experience as he has never seen light or the world.
Stanza 5
In the final stanza, the blind boy requests others not to destroy his happiness by taking and mourning about something which he can never have (i.e. eyesight). He asks them to let him sing that he is a king of his little dark world though, in reality, he is just “a poor blind boy”.
