ntil function thirty, but Rivkin & Ryan, 1998 discuss only the first six in detail. (p. 31)].“The Little Girl Found” begins after the lion and the lioness take young Lyca into their cave. The perspective changes to that of Lyca’s parents. The parents search for their lost daughter, believing that she is “Starv’d in the desart wild.” The parents continue their search for more than a week until the mother can go no further. The father assists her when “Till before their way, A couching lion lay.” The parents encounter the lion for the first time. It’s too late to turn back and so the lion circles them in a manner that appears to be menacingly. However, after they look into the lion’s eyes their worries subside. He licks their hands and leads then to Lyca. The lion was not the villain that he initially appeared to be. He protected the lost girl. The poem ends with the lines: “To this day they dwell In a lonely dell Nor fear the wolvish howl, Nor the lion’s growl.”The assertion that Blake makes in this poem is that often one’s assumptions (perhaps regarding a person, animal or place) are not always valid. A reader of the poem can assume that the lion does not have good intentions. It can be presumed that the lion plans on eating the child after he and the lioness take the child into the cave. However, these presumptions would be incorrect. Blake tricks the reader by making the savior of the child a lion. Had the savior been an old woman or a sheep or a doe then the feeling of the poem would have been different and the impact less effective. Had such been the case then the outcome of the tale would have been predictable and the poem would have taken on a completely different meaning. That the savior was the lion, an animal that is expected to be ferocious and feral plays on the reader’s ex...
