“The Little Girl Lost”/ “The Little Girl Found” Propp’s essay “Morphology of the Folktale” (Rivkin & Ryan, p. 28) is perfectly suitable when analyzing Blake’s poems, “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found.” Propp discusses the function of the dramatic personae and its applicability to stories that run their course in the form of a tale or a fairy tale. Blake’s combined poems (Songs 34, 35, 36) follow this pattern. However, Blake offers a surprise. The figure that is expected to be the villain (according to Propp’s terminology) turns out to be a gentle and benevolent hero.According to Propp (Rivkin & Ryan, 1998), the functions of the dramatic personae are the basic components of the tale that must be extracted. When a tale is studied in this way, a morphology results. Morphology refers to “a description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole” (Rivkin & Ryan, 1998). In order to fully analyze a work, more specifically a tale, in this manner a series of functions should be observed. Propp (Rivkin & Ryan, 1998) explains that a tale usually begins with some sort of initial situation. In the case of “The Little Girl Lost” the initial situation is that Lovely Lyca (“seven summers old”) lays outside on a day that is agreeable and pleasant. The first function of the dramatis personae is absentation where one of the members of the family leaves the home. It is Lovely Lyca who “had wandered long, Hearing wild bird’s song.” Lovely Lyca’s parents do not know where she is and so they weep for her.The second function of the dramatis personae is referred to as the interdiction and this interdiction is addressed to the hero. It is often expressed as a warning and it conveys to the reader that the hero may be in ...
