Chimney Sweeper Essay

In the 1700's, petite children were coerced to clean chimneys. Considering this, William Blake wrote two similar, yet different, poems about a chimney sweeper. Both of these poems give off a certain feeling towards the reader, yet they do it while utilizing unalike poetic techniques. 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

darkness of the forest, its eyes burning bright and fearless. The one poem that Blake wrote to protest child labor laws in England during his time period was, “The Chimney Sweeper” where a small child expresses what a daily life of a chimney sweep entails. It starts with a small child describing what happened to his family that put him in the Chimney Sweeping business, then it goes to describing how another child is crying because of having all of his hair cut off. But the biggest impact that is thrown into

In William Blake's Poem “The Chimney Sweeper”, Blake uses allusions, symbols, and metaphor to convey his theme of Innocence, Death, and Youth. With this Blake also goes in depth about the speakers childhood. Finally Blake ends with a dream and how innocence is a major part of the poem. Blake’s foundation of this poem relies on biblical allusions which provide the poem with a theme of innocence and, without them, Blake may have just had an ordinary poem with no deeper meaning in it. Linkin states

William Blake’s poetry contains many themes of religion. Examining Blake’s works, The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy shows an example of this. In The Chimney Sweeper Tom dreams an angel comes to him and tells him “If he’d be a good boy, he’d have God for his father & never want joy” (122). Upon waking the next day, despite the cold temperatures, Tom feels warm even though he had to work hard in a potentially deadly job that he was forced into. Could this be because he had a great dream

it allows for a deeper understanding of the intended meaning. In William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence, Blake depicts a child who was sold into the work force by his widower father. The child is so young, in fact, he cannot correctly pronounce ‘sweep’, instead crying “weep weep weep…” (3). The child, the perceived speaker of the piece, describes to the audience a fellow chimney sweeper named Tom Dacre. Tom has a

the poem was written. Therefore, intertextualization is taking a great part in the study of the poem. Blake employs his narrative voice here. The Londoners whom Blake sees and hears while wandering in the streets of London like the infant, the chimney sweeper, the soldier and the harlot, all of whose cries are heard by Blake, have their own stories to tell. Blake, by means of his subjectivity and historicity writes the poem in the same way as a travel writer does when he writes a travel document.

In The Chimney Sweeper, William Blake uses innocent and accusatory tones to illustrate the truth and ignorance of the children’s role in society. Blake uses simplistic and allusive diction, as well as concrete imagery to convey the corruption of innocence experienced by both of the speakers in the poems. The poems reveal the injustice children felt at the hands of society and the children's blissful innocence under harsh conditions. Blake employs simplistic and allusive diction to portray the innocent

social classes” is deeply rooted within the lines of Blake’s work. (Gardner, Pg. 146). In fact, “The Chimney Sweeper,” which was first published in 1789, a full half a century before Karl Marx first publicized his Marxist theory in 1848, has several instances of Marxist tones. Critic, Janet E. Gardner, argues that the theological similarities between the views expressed in the poem “Chimney Sweeper” and Karl Marx’s beliefs are easily found. For example, Karl believed that literary characters could

If the lights are off, everything looks perfect. You can’t see the cracked chess pieces and torn tapestries, yellowing stained glass windows and rotting windowpanes. All you can see is the false beauty of the room, filled to the top with broken luxuries. When I was younger, bug eyed and naive, I only saw Marie’s white birthday cake house and color TV. She had a little dog that followed after her, and lay down at our feet as I tried to hide my worn shoes and the slowly unraveling hem of my dress

Today I’ve chosen to study William Blake’s poem The Chimney Sweeper and a Slam Poem called What Guys Look For In Girls by Savannah Brown. The Chimney Sweeper follows the story of a young child who is sold by his father to work as a chimneysweeper after his mother died. During this time, he observes another boy named Tom Darce. In the beginning of the poem Tom was very upset and cried when his head/…was shaved. By the end, due to the narrator of the story Tom was happy & warm. The poem shows how