A Miserable Wondering and Seeking

William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” in his Songs of Innocence is a literary masterpiece that is still relevant and impactful in the modern world. In lovely form and description, Blake explains the atrocities and hardships of the Industrial Age in a poem suitable for school-age children and with the beautiful simplicity that only a writer like Blake could produce. The Songs of Innocence is a look into the purity and wonderful outlook on life that children usually have. While in its counterpart, the Songs of Experience, Blake uses adults as protagonist. The Songs of Experience is a look at the effects that hardships and failures have on adults, therefore having a pessimistic outlook toward life. In his these two works, Blake produces a parallel universe between childhood and adulthood where the optimism of dreams of childhood and the bitterness and stagnation of adulthood never seem to know one another.

Throughout the poems, us the readers, visualized the different techniques William Blake uses. As well as how different and similar both of them are. The Chimney Sweeper, in my opinion, talks about how the parents of a child don’t really want him or her in their lives because of how they are trying to get rid of them. Yet on the second poem, Blake went straight to the point by not using many stanzas. He uses several types of figurative language that guide us through both of the poems. Which made them sound more interesting and understandable to the readers.

Children of a lower social rank were not fortunate enough to receive and education and instead were expected to learn nothing except how to master their given trade. In his poem, Blake implies that due to organized religion and society failing them, these working children were only free in their dreams. He writes about a dream in which an angel came to Tom Dacre and all the sweepers with a key and unlocked them from their black coffins. This symbolizes freeing the boys from their seven by seven holes that they were confined to each day. Once freed by the angel, the boys were no longer required to work and were free to roam and play in the fields similar to how the children of the middle and upper class had done. Enjoying their freedom, the boys, “wash in a river and shine in the Sun” ridding themselves of the soot that had become embedded in their skin as they soaked in the warmth of the sun (Blake 15-16). The angel then came to Tom and told him that “if he'd be a good boy, / He'd have God for his father & never want joy” (Blake 19-20). Tom’s dream acts as a tool for Blake to comment on the lack of involvement and help from the Church upon the failure to do their

People are apt to learn new information, but it takes time, practice, and a good teacher, in order to do it correctly and to retain understanding. This poem shows the author’s (a teacher’s) frustration towards the elementary mistake that inexperienced readers or students make when poetry is first introduced. Unable to read the poem properly, they often do not capture a poem’s natural beauty and truth. The author says to observe a poem to see its true colors or its natural state (590; lines 1-5). He wants readers to search the “surface of the poem” to see a glimpse of the deeper side of the poem— to see its meaning and understand (lines 9-11). However, the author simply sees people rushing

These two poems address the same problem: chimney sweepers. They are similar in structure because they both rhyme with the last words of each line like aabb. For instance, in the first poem the rhyming goes like this, “When my mother died I was very young, (line 1) And my father sold me while yet my tongue (line 2) Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep” (line 3) So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep” (line 4). The second poem incorporates a similar rhyme scheme. For example, “A little black thing among the snow (line 1) Crying “‘weep! ‘weep,” in notes of woe! (line 2) “Where are thy father & mother? Say?” (line 3) “They are both gone up to the church to pray” (line 4). Blake most likely generated the analogous rhyme scheme in order to portray the identical

In the 1789 poem of "The Chimney Sweeper" Blake says how children were forced to work as chimney cleaners, and how there can be accidents when they clean. For example, in this poem a child name Tom is crying because his head had "curled like a lambs back". While his friend tries to calm him down by telling him, "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bore, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair". Another

The foil poems The Chimney Sweeper Songs of Innocence and The Chimney Sweeper Songs of Experience by William Blake show a clear juxtaposition in ideas. Songs of Innocence, shows an idyllic view of religion, with a faithful boy entrusting his future to a higher power. In contrast, the second poem, Songs of Experience, shows a cynical view of religion with no hope for a better future. As a result of these ideas, the author conveys a sense of hopelessness for the future of these children, regardless of their ideals. Through tone and imagery, William Blake shows the hypocrisy of religion in relation to child labor during the eighteenth century.

Emotion Evoking In the poem “The Chimney Sweeper”, Blake narrates using detailed imagery throughout this poem. The opening line states “When my mother died I was very young/ And my father sold me while yet my tongue/could scarcely cry 'weep!

In his 1794 publication Songs of Experience, romantic poet William Blake describes the life of a child chimney-sweeper during the Industrial Revolution. Unlike his counterparts, in addition to discussing the distance from nature due to industrialization and mechanization, Blake spoke heavily against child labor; protesting the government, religion, and the dissimilation of family.

Throughout world history their have been and are many occurrences of society corruption and oppression of masses, such as the forcing of small children to sweep chimneys. Thus, William Blake’s Purpose in writing the two “The Chimney Sweeper” poems was to express his outrage at society for having oppressed and stolen the innocence of powerless children in forcing them to sweep. Both poems are similar in that he uses the actions and view point of the child speaker to express his rage against society, mostly through his verbal irony. However, the poems distinct in that one shares the view point of an innocent child who hasn’t yet fully experienced the corruption of society , whereas the other one is one of a more experienced child who

William Blake simplifies the mind’s ability to dream outside of its actual reality, and elaborates on this fact with his poems “The Chimney Sweeper: Songs of Innocence” and “The Chimney Sweeper: Songs of Experience” by examining the mind’s development over the years.

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience dichotomy is perhaps the most notable illustration of this progression. Songs of Innocence is a collection of poems dedicated to the whimsical nature of children, contrasting Songs of Experience, an anthology demonstrating the contempt and negativity that is derived from maturity. Both collections include poems titled, “The Chimney Sweeper.” The chimney sweep of innocence tells the story of Tom Dacre, a young boy who has yet to learn the misery that accompanies a sweeper’s lifestyle. He tells of a dream in which an angel releases them from their “coffins of black”

The amazing aspect of art is that it has the ability to record history, especially the difficulty or strong emotion of it. The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake, written in 1789 and again in 1794, provides a reflection of a time of harsh, child labor. Written five years apart, the two poems have similarities and differences that are observable through techniques Blake uses such as, imagery, diction, tone, mood, theme, rhyme, size, and point of view.

Observation and description are said to function as the core elements of today’s poetry as poets are being led away from their role as teachers of morality. Instead, in many modern poems, it is the description of something mundane that can serve as a trigger for much bigger thoughts yet at the same time allow the mundane to stay as it is, without any overt value judgment. To make such a poem work, the choice of words and descriptions is the most important, and as Trotter remarks regarding a quote by Ted Hughes: “Description [...] is a matter of picking out and remembering significant details: ‘then it is just a matter of presenting those vividly in words’” (246). That presentation is what makes poetry come to life, and in their poems “Digging”,

“The Chimney Sweeper” is a poem written by William Blake (1757 –1827). His main aim is to expose the social defects in his age and the vices which afflict his society and to confront his readers with the dreadful suffering of the working paupers. According to Blake, the chimney-sweeping life is not a life at all; the labourer children have lost their childhood, their freedom, and their innocence. He criticizes the victimisation of children and the injustice of this oppressive labour. He shows how Tom; the chimney sweeper and other children suffer from long hard labour in addition to physical and psychological abuse. Blake insists that these children are living in abject and inhumane conditions of deprivation, misery and humiliation