William Blake

My senior year in high school I took AP English. Interestingly, in the AP exam I’m pretty sure I was asked to compare and contrast “The Chimney Sweeper” from both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Having not read William Blake before and not being familiar with the two poems, I’m not sure that I did very well. I’m going to try again at this by focusing in on these two poems specifically.

The poem “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence is the first of the two poems which Burke wrote. Overall, the poem seems to give more hope and although, still not a happy poem, seems to give a happier tone than the other poem. The first two stanzas are emotional and tell the reader how the young child was sold into being a chimney sweeper and tells of his life because of it. He describes, “my father sold me while yet my tongue could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep weep.” (ln2-3), meaning that he was sold very young before he had even learned to talk. In addition, Blake uses a play on words when the child crys “weep weep weep weep” referring to the child’s profession “Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!” Tom Dacre is a younger child in the poem whose dream the speaker describes in detail gives a hopeful tone to the poem. In line 6, Tom Dacre is described as a lamb, a symbol for both innocence and purity. Blake wants the reader to see that the children are innocent and have been forced into black soot, a color resembling sin and death. In Blake’s poems, he uses dark and light and white and black contrasting images frequently to convey his themes. He does this first in line 8 when the reader remarks that “the soot cannot spoil your white hair.” Here Blake makes the point that the soot and grief cannot spoil his purity and innocence. In the 3rd stanza, Tom’s dream begins. Throughout the dream, the poem seems to flow better and have more even rhythm. The tone seems to lighten and bring a happy moment for the young chimney sweep. At the beginning of the dream, the sweepers are “lock’d up in coffins of black” symbolizing a dark life leading only to death. At death, the Angel “open’d the coffins & set them all free” and the children are able to play in a normal way. Brighter images are seen in the next two stanzas. Words and phrases are used such as “green plain,” “leaping through the sun,” “rise upon clouds,” and “sport in the wind.” All these images give a carefree view of the children playing in a meadow. It is also a very nice image of the children being set free describing them as being “naked and white.” As chimney sweeps, the children are black and covered with soot. In the dream, they are seen in their pure state. In the last stanza, Tom wakes up in the “dark.” He is back to reality, back to agony and darkness. The last line of the poem is very disturbing to the reader. The speaker states that “if all do their duty they need not fear harm.” Here its almost as if the speaker accepts his fate as being okay and all they have to do is their job and things will work out.

In Burke’s second poem “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Experience, the mood seems to be much more pessimistic and darker. The black and white contrasting image is seen again in the first line of the poem, “A little black thing among the snow.” An image of sin and pain is seen against the white pure snow. In the first two lines, Blake concentrates on giving an image of the anguished child. He also, like the poem from Song of Innocence, conveys the child’s crying “weep, weep” instead of “sweep, sweep.” It is sweeping that has given the child so much grief. At the end of the first stanza, the speaker is asked about their parents, which is the reason for the child’s grief. The second stanza gives two contrasting moods. In the first two lines of the stanza, the child seems happy speaking of being “happy upon the heath” and smiling “among the winters snow.” Again, snow is mentioned to represent cleanliness and purity. Contrasting these images are the last two lines of the stanza. The child speaks of their parents and gives dark images saying that they “clothed me in the clothes of death.” Because the child was happy, the parents made him a chimney sweep so that they could “sing the notes of woe.” In the third stanza, it is apparent that Blake is criticizing and blaming the parents, the church, and the state for the woe of these children. The last two lines of the poem describe that the parents “are gone to praise God & his Priest & King who make up a heaven of our misery.” The state and church have let these things happen and the sweeper’s parents are no help to the child. They would rather find love at the church than give love to their child.

In the second poem, the speaker seems to be more pessimistic and is never freed from misery. In the first poem, featured in Song of Innocence, the speaker is more naïve and gives himself hope to accept his life as a chimney sweep. In both poems though, Blake successfully conveys they fact that the chimney sweeps lived a dark life and that something needed to be changed.