The Theme Of Cruelty Towards Children By William Blake

“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

“Holy Thursday” wherein he bluntly, yet poetically says, “Is this a holy thing to see/ In a rich

The Songs of Innocence poems first appeared in Blake’s 1784 novel, An Island in the Moon. In 1788, Blake began to compile in earnest, the collection of Songs of Innocence. And by 1789, this original volume of plates was complete. These poems are the products of the human mind in a state of innocence, imagination, and joy; natural euphoric feelings uninhibited or tainted by the outside world. Following the completion of the Songs of Innocence plates, Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and it is through this dilemma of good and evil and the suffering that he witnesses on the streets of London, that he begins composing Songs of Experience. This second volume serves as a response to Songs of

While the Smolinsky family is not literally “hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages”, this displays to the reader how desperation affected them. The metaphor acts as a bridge between the reader and the event, therefore allowing them to feel the same worry that Sara harbors through the shared experience of “hanging” without support. It is important for the audience to relate to the characters, yet this cannot happen if the author’s portrayal gives little humanity to their characters. Hence, when Yezierska writes that financial help according to Sara and her family is a “stab into our burning shame”, it shows that despite any prior notions of poverty being an “ornament”, they still have human wants and needs. Moreover, it shows that her characters are not emotionless apathetic beings that live only on their faith; they too endure deviations from what is expected of them. At any rate, repeated similes have an analogous consequence on the reader's thoughts. Multiple comparisons within a small section of text compound the anxiety, bombarding the same heavy emotions that Sara feels onto the reader in a way that they can sympathize with her, and in turn, Yezierska herself. Altogether, these literary moves go further than simply entertaining the audience, but informing them about what the world was truly

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.

On January 1st, 2017, a gang held an alleyway waiting for people to come through so they and take their money. The alley was very dark. People came through the alley at nights and trashed the alley, cracking windows, leaving cigarettes on the dirty spray-painted ground littered with sharp shards of glass from a broken window. Their leader, Kole Blazer, was there in the rooftops, waiting for someone to come through, when he saw someone betray his gang: Mike Blazer, his brother. Kole was taller than him by only a few inches. He had brown hair, freckles, blue eyes, more muscular than his brother who was always the weaker one, but they were twins and he wanted to keep a secret. His brother betrayed them and now it’s time for payback.

There are times when the suffering of some can bring greater happiness for others. A small example, would be when one individual loses a job, another can gain a job. However, this is demonstrated unfairly in the city of Omelas. Locked in a damp, dark basement exists a child bereft of all love, care, and opportunity. "It has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect" (260). Its ' gender is left unidentified to emphasize its ' destitute and feeble state. The child embodies all the hallmarks of extreme poverty, including the lack of proper nutrition, health, education, as well as poor economic and social standing. "The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes" (261). "They all know [the child] is there, all the people

Though William Blake was a religious man, he held ‘a highly critical attitude toward the religious conventions of the established church, which [he] identified […] as the “state religion” […] with notorious “state tricksters”’. This is explicitly conveyed through his two versions of ‘Holy Thursday’ in both ‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of Experience’. In the ‘Songs of Innocence’ version, though on the surface it seems sweet and sublime, there is an underlying danger and brutality to the words expressed. For example, in the first quatrain, the children are described to be “walking two & two in red & blue & green”. Although this use of bright, simplistic colours gives the impression of childhood, hope and joy, there is a sinister undertone, hinting at the colours being bruises on the children’s skin, from being beaten from the euphemistic “wand” that the “grey-headed beadles” held. Also, the notion that they are to walk “two & two” suggests a large amount of control from their

William Blake focused on biblical images in the majority of his poetry and prose. Much of his well-known work comes from the two compilations Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems in these compilations reflect Blake's metamorphosis in thought as he grew from innocent to experienced. An example of this metamorphosis is the two poems The Divine Image and A Divine Image. The former preceded the latter by one year.

Ground-breaking, momentous, and a time of great struggle, the Industrial Revolution was famous for its innovations and infamous for the sobering reality it inflicted upon the standard family. Mid-18th century Britain brought poverty to everyday urban workers. With it, came an increase in child labor like never seen before. In order for a normal family to survive in the urban lifestyle, all members of a family had to work. This included children as young as four years to work as chimney sweepers, miners, and most popularized in 18th century Britain, factory workers. By the year 1800, children under the age of 14 in Britain’s factories accounted for 50% of the labor force (“Industrial Revolution, Child Labor”). Though the number continued to grow, all did not go unaccounted for. Romanticism, an effort opposite the movement, gave recognition to the emotional conflicts overlooked. Romanticism shed light on the daily struggles of the everyday man, woman, and the most neglected up until that period of time, the child. Throughout history, others have written about childhood, but Romantic poets began to question what it meant to be a child. The question, though not answered directly, later became revealed in their works where it exposed their belief systems. The role of the child in British Romantic Poetry represents the early life of Romantic poets, and the qualities they possessed in childhood.

William Blake is one of England’s most famous literary figures. He is remembered and admired for his skill as a painter, engraver, and poet. He was born on Nov. 28, 1757 to a poor Hosier’s family living in or around London. Being of a poor family, Blake received little in the way of comfort or education while growing up. Amazingly, he did not attend school for very long and dropped out shortly after learning to read and write so that he could work in his father’s shop. The life of a hosier however was not the right path for Blake as he exhibited early on a skill for reading and drawing. Blake’s skill for reading can be seen in his understanding for and use of works such as the Bible and Greek classic literature.

“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.

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. He was not recognized during his lifetime and now is considered as a seminal figure and criticised over the twentieth and even this century. Blake’s strong philosophical and religious beliefs in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. Although he was from London he spent his entire life in Felpham.

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.