Comparison Of A Chimney Sweeper

“The Chimney Sweeper” (128): This version of the Chimney Sweeper is very upfront and saddening. The version that is presented in the songs of innocence is much more of a calm town and is not as straightforward, while this version is very short and to the point. In this version its very deep as the narrator basically just calls out the parents/church for doing these horrible things to the children. I really love all three stanzas of this poem because they all have a really deep meaning and Blake transitions through them very well. Reading this poem over and over I don’t know what to make of it other than it is an absolute horrible situation. I think it can be tied in to

Blake could be saying that if the world were not under man's control, and if the poor people were free from oppression, poverty would not exist. Poverty is the result of man's own selfishness. In "The Chimney Sweeper" and "Holy Thursday" there are many recurring symbols and themes including the callous attitude of parents to children. In "The Chimney Sweeper" the children are referred to as "little black things".

When writing a collection of poems, most poets chose to focus on maintaining certain themes throughout their literature and Cornelius Eady is not an exception. Cornelius Eady’s collection of poems in Brutal Imagination focus on issues such as racism, family crisis, internal conflict, and death. The first part of the collection circles around a servant who works for Susan Smith and is the caretaker for her children. The story centers around the perspective of the servant who is also the overarching narrator. The story describes old version of United States when racism was still bluntly present and affected individuals identities and financial opportunities. Based off the information presented in the collection, the servant can possibly be male. The general plot follows deeply into the difficult life of the male servant through examining the issues he faces. The first poem within the collection set-ups the rest of the story with context for the readers giving them a few expectations about what they should look forward to reading further. Eady draws the reader through integrating an origin for the male servant and his connection to Susan Smith’s family.

Both “The Chimney Sweepers” poems were written during the industrial revolution. During the industrial revolution families were living in poverty, and times were challenging. Often times for families to survive they would sell their children to master sweeps, or master sweeps would welcome orphans and homeless children into the industry of menial labour. They used children between the ages of five to ten depending on their size. Parents would often sell their children younger, because their small frames were more desirable. Even though “The Chimney Sweeper” (1789) and “The Chimney Sweeper” (1794) were written five years apart they show many similarities and differences.

William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper, written in 1789, tells the story of what happened to many young boys during this time period. Often, boys as young as four and five were sold for the soul purpose of cleaning chimneys because of their small size. These children were exploited and lived a meager existence that was socially acceptable at the time. Blake voices the evils of this acceptance through point of view, symbolism, and his startling irony.

Both Seamus Heaney and William Blake explore the themes of innocence and experience in their poems. Heaney’s poetry develops powerful ideas of sacrifice in which childhood’s innocence is surrendered to a more experienced and developed life. Similarly, Blake explores innocence and experience through his religious awareness of sacrifice where innocence is repeatedly presented through childhood’s lack of experience. Both poets poetry have religious references drawing from a childhood of Christianity. However, through Blake’s poetry we feel a solid sense of obstruction to the organised religion of Catholicism which is evidently

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This poem dramatizes the conflict between a child who desires a verbalization of love and a father who expresses love through actions rather than words. The first stanza informs the reader that the action of the poem occurred in the past, and the speaker reflects upon it. The speaker describes the house as being “blueblack cold” during the wintertime (2), which not only allows the setting to be determined but also allows an inference to be made about the emotional companionship (or lack thereof) within the house. The father used to awake earlier than the rest of the family in order to start a fire to keep his family as comfortable as possible, though “no one ever thanked him” (5). This line introduces the regret of the reader pertaining to the treatment of the father.

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

Even though both poets bring to light the harshness of child labor, Browning and Blake take completely different approaches to the issue. Where Blake presents child labor as a sad way of life, Browning displays the evils of it as it steals the children’s youth, their innocence and takes God from them. Of the two, Browning’s approach is more resounding as well as artistically more appealing then Blake’s.

     William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” was mainly about the possibilities of both hope and faith. Although the poem’s connotation is that of a very dark and depressed nature, the religious imagery Blake uses indicates that the sweeps will have a brighter future in eternity.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is the foundation of the work of one of the greatest. English poets and artists. The two sets of poems reveal what William Blake calls “the two contrary states of the human soul.” In both series, he offers clues to deeper meanings and suggests ways out of the apparent trap of selfhood, so that each reading provides greater insight and understanding, not only to the poems but also to human life. Throughout this poem, the logic of this poem favors experience rather than innocence since in most of the poem , because purity is has little durability and is temporary but experience is permament and strong causing people to learn acceptance and adapt to reality.

In both of William Blake’s poems, “The Little Black Boy” and “The Chimney Sweeper,” an innocent-eye point of view portrays the stresses of society in an alternative way to an adult’s understanding. The innocent perspective redirects focus onto what society has become and how lacking each narrator is in the eyes of the predominant white culture. Each naïve speaker also creates an alternate scenario that presents a vision of what their skewed version of life should be like, showing how much their unfortunate youth alters their reality. From the viewpoint of children, Blake’s poems highlight the unhealthy thoughts or conditions in their lives and how unfortunate they were to be the wrong race or class level. These narrators were cheap laborers and were in no control of how society degraded them. Such usage of a child’s perspective offers important insight into the lives of these poor children and raises awareness for the horrible conditions children faced in the London labor force prior to any labor laws. The children of the time had no voice or platform on which to express their opinions on their conditions. Blake targets society’s lack of mindfulness towards the children using the innocent-eye point of view and illusions of what they dream for in life.

"The Chimney Sweeper" is a quintessential Blake poem as it embodies his belief in looking towards the future for hope and comfort. Additionally, the poem is a perfect example of a child's movement from innocence to

“The Chimney Sweeper”, the romantic poem by William Blake and “The Second Coming”, the modern poem by W.B. Yeats.present readers with two interpretations of hope. “The Second Coming” is set in 1940s Europe, while “The Chimney Sweeper” looks at a specific group in a certain period of European history. Speakers in both poems certainly state that people are hopeless towards an certain future, but comparing and contrasting them reveals that the tone which they used to show their attitudes are quite different.In “The Chimney Sweeper”, the speaker expresses his thought in a sarcastic tone, meanwhile, the tone that the speaker from “The Second Coming” used is more pessimistic.