The Chimney Sweeper By William Walker Analysis

William Blake was deeply aware of the great political and social issues during his time focusing his writing on the injustices going on in the world around him. He juxtaposed the state of human existence through his works Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), showing differentiating sides of humanity. The contrast between Songs of

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.

William Blake’s poetry touches on the religion, poverty, and child labor. The Songs of Innocence and Experience includes several poems that protest social injustices. Blake’s poem “London” examines the state of the city during this time period and how the speaker is appalled by what he sees. The mention of “…the Chimney-sweeper’s cry” (94) reveals the speaker’s stance on child labor. The child cries because he is a victim of

At its fundamental level, adulthood is simply the end of childhood, and the two stages are, by all accounts, drastically different. In the major works of poetry by William Blake and William Wordsworth, the dynamic between these two phases of life is analyzed and articulated. In both Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience and many of Wordsworth’s works, childhood is portrayed as a superior state of mental capacity and freedom. The two poets echo one another in asserting that the individual’s progression into adulthood diminishes this childhood voice. In essence, both poets demonstrate an adoration for the vision possessed by a child, and an aversion to the mental state of adulthood. Although both Blake and Wordsworth show childhood as

William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” greatly mimics the mere thought of innocence. He wants to show the brutality of child labor and the loss of innocence it causes. This poem reflects the workforce for children and the controversial issues it causes, such as: harmful work environment, extinction of a childhood, and the complete loss of innocence. The poem uses many contrasts to show the purity of childhood and the brutalities of the work force. Along with that, the boy dreams of being pure and clean once again which is totally opposite of the life that he is living.

In “The Chimney Sweeper” William Blake draws out the image of life as a literal chimney sweeper in London during the late eighteenth century. Blake explains the struggles of a young boy who has to endure the painful lifestyle after his mother passed and his father sold him to the sweeping business. After reading the poem once through, techniques such as rhyme and diction stand out, but a close reading of the poem shows the central issue Blake is trying to address in “The Chimney Sweeper”: inequality. The figurative language used in the poem emphasizes the justice he wants served when referring to the harsh conditions of child labor.

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, printed in 1794, “represents the world as it is envisioned by what he calls ‘two contrary states of the human soul’” (Greenblatt, 1452). This collection of poetry is accompanied by pictures, which create a mutually reliant relationship that allows for complete understanding of Blake’s works. “To read a Blake poem without the pictures is to miss something important: that relationship is an aspect of the poem’s argument” (1452). Overall, Blake’s works in Songs of Innocence and Experience provides a greater understanding into human life. Through poetry, Blake juxtaposes the innocence of childhood with the corruption of adulthood. Thus, his work allows the reader to see situations from a double-sided lens of innocence and then of experience. These two perspectives, known as the “two contrary states of the human soul”, are independent and each poem is accompanied by another poem; the poem ““Infant Joy” is paired with “Infant Sorrow” and the meek “Lamb” reveals its other aspect of divinity in the flaming, wrathful “Tyger”” (1456). In Songs of Innocence, published in 1789, celebrates the innocence and untainted nature of childhood but it also doubles as a warning to adults. It warns them that the corruption of society and culture is to come and in Songs of Experience, a state of being that encompasses the loss of childhood vitality and corruption caused by social and political influence. The “innocence” and “experience” that Blake

In Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794), William Blake arouses readers' minds and leads them into a path of finding their own answers and conclusions to his poems. He sets up his poems in the first book, Songs of Innocence, with a few questions as if they were asked from a child's perspective since children are considered the closest representation of innocence in life. However, in the second book, Songs of Experience, Blake's continues to write his poems about thought-provoking concepts except the concepts happen to be a little bit more complex and relevant to experience and time than Songs of Innocence.

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.

The strong contrast between the dream and the reality makes people feel upset and heartbreaking because we see these children still have to undertake much what they are not supposed to bear. Nevertheless, what upsets people more was the fact that these chimney sweeper accept their current fate happily with a hope that future will be better if they obey the rule and do their duty. However, the fact is that the circumstances have no hope of freedom from this oppression if they don’t take any action. Therefore, this is an anesthetization in mind because, in this way, workers and the weak would not unite to stand against the inhuman conditions forced upon them. Blake here critiques not just the deplorable conditions of the children sold into chimney sweeping, but also the society, and particularly its religious aspect that would offer these children palliatives rather than aid. That the speaker and Tom Dacre gets up from the vision to head back into their dangerous drudgery suggests that these children cannot help themselves, so it is left to responsible, sensitive adults to do something for them.

Writers and artists are influenced by the culture of their time. They respond to the world around them through their work. In the 18th century, England was plagued by the gruesome repercussions of the industrial revolution. One such repercussion was the child labor of the time, where young boys at the ages of five and six were for forced to work in harsh conditions, either sweeping chimneys or working in factories. William Blake used his romantic style of writing to commentate on these ever growing corruptions of the world. Blake’s Chimney Sweeper Poems use opposing ideas of innocence and experience to describe the world he sees by the use of literary devices.

“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

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.

Some of William Blake’s poetry is categorized into collections called Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Blake explores almost opposite opinions about creation in his poems “The Lamb” and “The Tiger.” While the overarching concept is the same in both, he uses different subjects to portray different sides of creation; however, in the Innocence and Experience versions of “The Chimney Sweeper,” Blake uses some of the same words, rhyme schemes, and characters to talk about a single subject in opposite tones.

Many scholars, authors, and artists have recently turned to William Blake as to the most rebellious of the English romanticists, who views are now familiar. In a time when terrorism, religious fundamentalism and racial conflict mark our daily lives, the Blake provides a dynamic incursion of tolerant hope into that horizon. Blake was truly a unique artist and thinker worthy of much praise and academic study. I was obviously inspired by two of author’s famous poetry books, “The Songs of Innocence” and “The Songs of Experience”. The most of studies are done on this field by various researchers. Most of them are concentrating on the social significance of Blake’s work. According to Ben Wilkinson “..the poems through the book explore the complex relationship between meaning and morality, the often blurred lines between the two contrary states of innocence and experience, as well as pervasive and widespread corruption: of church and of state, of the decline of sociability or ‘brotherhood’, and of the dulling of our sensory perceptions through the inevitable ‘fall’ from innocence (Wilkinson B. 2007)”. His poems are separated into innocence and experience, both opposites. As Innocence has the sound of laughter the initial ecstasy. The poet therefore becomes a sort of foreteller who can see more deeply into reality and who also tries to warn man of the evils of society. While the Innocence poems dwell on pleasure and relief, the poem of Experience emphasize the