Aloysius College Anuradhapura

No.22, Jaffna Road, Anuradhapura

GCE Adv. Level Literature

William Shakespeare- Sonnet-73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

              In this poem, the speaker invokes a series of metaphors to characterize the nature of what he perceives to be his old age. In the first quatrain, he tells the beloved that his age is like a “time of year,” late autumn, when the leaves have almost completely fallen from the trees, and the weather has grown cold, and the birds have left their branches. In the second quatrain, he then says that his age is like late twilight, “As after sunset fadeth in the west,” and the remaining light is slowly extinguished in the darkness, which the speaker likens to “Death’s second self.” In the third quatrain, the speaker compares himself to the glowing remnants of a fire, which lies “on the ashes of his youth”—that is, on the ashes of the logs that once enabled it to burn—and which will soon be consumed “by that which it was nourished by”—that is, it will be extinguished as it sinks into the ashes, which its own burning created. In the couplet, the speaker tells the young man that he must perceive these things, and that his love must be strengthened by the knowledge that he will soon be parted from the speaker when the speaker, like the fire, is extinguished by time.

              Sonnet 73 takes up one of the most pressing issues of the first 126 sonnets, the speaker’s anxieties regarding what he perceives to be his advanced age, and develops the theme through a sequence of metaphors each implying something different. The first quatrain, which employs the metaphor of the winter day, emphasizes the harshness and emptiness of old age, with its boughs shaking against the cold and its “bare ruined choirs” bereft of birdsong. In the second quatrain, the metaphor shifts to that of twilight, and emphasizes not the chill of old age, but rather the gradual fading of the light of youth, as “black night” takes away the light “by and by”. But in each of these quatrains, with each of these metaphors, the speaker fails to confront the full scope of his problem: both the metaphor of winter and the metaphor of twilight imply cycles, and impose cyclical motions upon the objects of their metaphors, whereas old age is final. Winter follows spring, but spring will follow winter just as surely; and after the twilight fades, dawn will come again. In human life, however, the fading of warmth and light is not cyclical; youth will not come again for the speaker. In the third quatrain, he must resign himself to this fact.

              The image of the fire consumed by the ashes of its youth is significant both for its brilliant disposition of the past—the ashes of which eventually snuff out the fire, “consumed by that which it was nourished by”—and for the fact that when the fire is extinguished, it can never be lit again. In this sense, Sonnet 73 is more complex than it is often considered supposed by critics and scholars. It is often argued that 73 and sonnets like it are simply exercises in metaphor—that they propose a number of different metaphors for the same thing, and the metaphors essentially mean the same thing. But to make this argument is to miss the psychological narrative contained within the choice of metaphors themselves. Sonnet 73 is not simply a procession of interchangeable metaphors; it is the story of the speaker slowly coming to grips with the real finality of his age and his impermanence in time. The couplet of this sonnet renews the speaker’s plea for the young man’s love, urging him to “love well” that which he must soon leave. It is important to note that the couplet could not have been spoken after the first two quatrains alone. No one loves twilight because it will soon be night; instead they look forward to morning. But, after the third quatrain, in which the speaker makes clear the nature of his “leave ere long,” the couplet is possible, and can be treated as a poignant and reasonable exhortation to the beloved.

External Degree Program-2017-2018 Bhiksu University of Sri Lanka Seminar -22.04.2018 8.00 am-12.15 pm

Read the following text and identify the problems faced by the people of Beddagama. When you attend the lecture, please bring the relevant quotations. You will be given marks for this activity.

1.  Improve your handwriting.

2.  Improve your spelling.

3.  Improve your grammar

4.  Write the name of the novel and author correctly.

5.  Read and collect relevant extracts.

6.  Get ready to do the classroom test

7.  Read all the prescribed novels, poems etc.

8.  Your accuracy is highly considered.

9.  All the take home assignments should be submitted on time.

10.              You should have done both presentation and classroom tests.

Please pay your attention to the above facts. It is compulsory.

The Village in the Jungle is a novel by Leonard Woolf, published in 1913, based on his experiences as a colonial civil servant in British-controlled Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the early years of the 20th century. Ground-breaking in Western fiction for being written from the native rather than the colonial point of view it is also an influential work of Sri Lankan literature.

Leonard Woolf worked for the British Ceylon Civil Service in Sri Lanka for seven years after graduating from Cambridge University in 1904. In Cambridge Woolf had become part of the Bloomsbury Group. He became Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota District, dealing with a variety of administrative and judicial issues. The district he was in charge of had a population of 100,000 people. Books he took with him to Sri Lanka included the complete works of Voltaire. Woolf also kept a comprehensive diary while there, and later said that his experiences in the country led to him adopting liberal political views and becoming an opponent of imperialism. He wrote The Village in the Jungle, his first novel, after he returned from Sri Lanka to England in 1911 while he was courting his future wife Virginia Stephen. He dedicated the novel to her.

The novel describes the lives of a poor family in a small village called Beddagama (literally, "The village in the jungle") as they struggle to survive the challenges presented by poverty, disease, superstition, the unsympathetic colonial system, and the jungle itself. The head of the family is a hunter named Silindu, who has two daughters named Punchi Menika and Hinnihami. After being manipulated by the village authorities and a debt collector, Silindu is put on trial for murder.

Leonard Woolf’s village in the jungle is a fascinating novel written about the life of the peasants in Sri Lanka during the British rule. The story takes place in a remote jungle village called “Baddegama”. The writer recalls the strange happenings not only within Baddegama but also in its surroundings. The story is between a high cast family and a low cast family and how a foreign man who comes to the village influences these two families. The story goes on describing how the low cast family is suffered by the high cast family and their friends in the village.

In 1980, Sir Lester James Peries released a superb film based on this well-known novel, naming it “Baddegama”. The film helped the novel to be as real as it was in the reader’s …show more content… 

Very fair…... and looking into her eyes goes round and round very quickly on the floor.”
Another feature I noticed in the book is that the descriptions involved the switching of characters, showing omniscient, so that different points of views are shown to the reader. This is the main and the most important technique used by Woolf to keep the readers eye on each and every letter of the novel. It amplifies the curiosity and helps the reader to understand what exactly is happening in each scene of the story. The film does this very mildly but can say it is a good attempt to give the reader more sensible feelings so that each scene was an exciting one. This is seen clearly in the court scene where Silindu and Babun are taken to court by Bebehamy and Fernando.

“The parties and witnesses in the case were taken at once to the court-house. They waited…... a small square wooden platform surrounded by a wooden balustrade on three of its sides”, this indicates that the narrator sees all this and it makes the reader look in the narrators point of view. 

The following lines shows how Silindu and Babun sees the court and the writer let the reader experience the state of the men
“Nothing happened all the morning. Babun and Silindu squatted down…, and they were led out and made to stand up against the wall on the left of the bench.”

Leonard Woolf’s village in the jungle is a fascinating novel written about the life of the peasants in Sri Lanka during the British rule. The story takes place in a remote jungle village called “Baddegama”. The writer recalls the strange happenings not only within Baddegama but also in its surroundings. The story is between a high cast family and a low cast family and how a foreign man who comes to the village influences these two families. The story goes on describing how the low cast family is suffered by the high cast family and their friends in the village.

In 1980, Sir Lester James Peries released a superb film based on this well known novel, naming it “Baddegama”. The film helped the novel to be as real as it was in the reader’s imagination as it gave faces to the main characters such as “Silindu”, and his two daughters, “Punchi Manika” and “Hinnihamy”, “Babun”, also not forgetting the cruel native doctor “Punchirala”, the village headman “Bebehamy” and “Fernando” the man who ruined the peace in Baddegama.

However in the book “village in the jungle”, Leonard Woolf has described the story approaching the reader in three different aspects which the film barely touched. As for one such characteristic is the use of dialogue. In the book, Woolf has used so much of dialogue, where as in the film less dialogue is seen. This is the first characteristic I saw when I watched the film. It felt as the book it self gave the needed pictures through the use of dialogue than the film. This was clearly seen in the scene where Fernando comes to the house of Babun and Punchi Manika. The conversation between Babun and Fernando when he says he wants Babun to be the “Gambaraya”. “Yes, aiya, we know that. The tank was built in my father’s time. And…….Appu was dead of the fever, and that his wife had gone away, and no one knew where she had gone” And also when Punchi Manika asked Fernando about the British women in Colombo, the film has given little dialogue of Fernando..

The story of Village in the Jungle is full of acrimony. It is disgusting to see that human beings are subjected to such levels of torture and misery by their own neighbors and the administrators. Unfortunately the story of the novel is not unique only to Baddegama. It is the story of the rural Sri Lanka during colonial times. The story of the rural villages is not that different even today with all the advancement of technology and democracy we are supposed to enjoy.

Leonard Woolf selects a few characters of the village Baddegama in the deep down south of Sri Lanka and tells us a story about how the dreams of a young couple, Babun and Punchimenika shatter away due to the lewdness of a trader who comes to the village and subsequent troubles created to separate Babun from Punchimenika.

In the backdrop of the main story, there is another story about Punchimenika’s younger sister, Hinnihamy being forced to marry an old and vicious indigenous medical practitioner and her subsequent death by the villagers due to the suspicions inculcated against her in the villagers’ mind by the medical practitioner as she refuses to be his wife.

Silindu, the protagonist of the novel leads a miserable life squeezed in to the jungle and the bureaucracy. He is as silent as a deer and becomes violent as a provoked water buffalo when it is too much for him to tolerate the wickedness of the world.

There is a Sinhala language movie with the same name based on the novel with lead roles played by Wijaya Kumarathunga, Malani Fonseka, Joe Abeywickrama, Tony Ranasinghe, D. R. Nanayakkara and Nadeeka Gunasekara. Dr. Arthur C. Clarke makes a cameo appearance. The film is directed by none other than Lester James Pieris.

This was so interesting. Horribly depressing and a little terrifying, but very interesting.

I happened across this minor classic novel at work. It was chosen by my library director as a featured book for one of our newsletters. I never heard of it before, but she discovered that it was written by the husband of Virginia Wolfe. I was curious enough to read a bit more about the novel and discovered it was about colonial Sri Lanka and that Leonard wrote it after being a general in Ceylon for many years.

Early prose has a fascinating way of being disturbing with very little actual disturbing imagery. There are no sex scenes and the violence is much more understated than that found in novels today, but Leonard definitely makes his point. Life in the tiny jungle village is rough and if the higher ups, the Sri Lanken headman and his associates, didn’t like you, then you are likely to starve. In years of poor crop yield disease is rampant in the weakened villagers and unless the headman is sympathetic to your family, death abounds.

The jungle is described in enough detail with enough personification that it is a character itself. It comes across as an indiscriminate monster and savior alike. The real monsters are the people. Power and safety are difficult to come by and when one or the other is secured, anything will be done to keep it.

I really felt for the protagonists and even the antagonists when all is said and done. The story mostly chronicles the life of Silindu and his twin daughters. They are individuals with their own agendas to live peacefully with themselves and the jungle. The villagers decide they are pariahs and even demons and therefore lift not even a finger to help them as they are plotted against over and over for the gains of others. The stories of his daughters, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami, are heartbreaking in the way there lives are wasted at the expense of others.

This is not a story with a happy ending, but in the end it’s clear that things keep moving regardless of the suffering of one village. This book really should be more well known. It’s unique in the period which it was written as it is about the colonists and not the colonizers and it is sympathetic to the colonists giving them life and stories of their own.

The village in the jungle described in the book is called Beddagama. It consists of 10 crude mud huts in a hot dry clearing hacked from the inexorable jungle in the south of Sri Lanka, the island then known as Ceylon. The novel tells the story of one family, the wild hunter Silindu and his two daughters, Punchi Menika and Hinnihami, and the bad things that happen to them when their lives start to go wrong. There is no safety net here. The jungle is harsh, the village malicious.

We enter into the mindset of rural people, feeling the terrors and joys of their spiritual beliefs. We also come to see how, in the material world, they are continually oppressed by debts to money-lenders and unbreakable obligations to village elders. Lust and greed start a chain of tragic events which, compounded by the ignorance and misunderstanding of judges, leads to the destruction of Silindu's family, and the swallowing up of their homes by the relentless and hostile scrub.

How on earth did the author come to compose it? How did he know so much about Sri Lanka, on the other side of the world?

Leonard Woolf was the son of a Jewish barrister who attended St Paul's School in London and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1899. There he made friends with people like Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, EM Forster, Desmond McCarthy and Thoby Stephen, in whose rooms he first met Stephen's sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, in 1901.

This group of Cambridge friends would over the next few decades become the core of the progressive and bohemian Bloomsbury Group, named after the London neighbourhood near the British Museum where, as the saying went, "they lived in squares and loved in triangles".

When he graduated from Cambridge in 1904, Leonard Woolf joined the Colonial Civil Service and was sent to Ceylon, where he stayed for the next seven years. Woolf was a liberal intellectual - he travelled out with the complete works of Voltaire in his luggage, in 70 volumes - and he was not enamoured of the white colonial society he found himself in. He threw himself into his administrative work, was promoted to Assistant Government Agent and in 1908 he was put in charge of running his own district in south-east Ceylon, Hanbantota Province, which covered 1,000 square miles and contained 100,000 people.

Woolf taught himself Sinhalese and Tamil and he travelled all over his district, dealing with agriculture, justice, public health, road-building, taxation and petty problems of every kind. He got to know the people of the area and the hard lives that they led. He kept a detailed diary of his daily activities, which still survives and was published in 1963, and he drew on it heavily when he came to write The Village in the Jungle on his return to England in 1911. There's a murder in the novel, for example, which is just like an incident which Woolf himself had to investigate, the corpse slowly swelling in the heat. And there's a trial, which takes place in the very court-room in Hanbantota where Woolf himself sat as the magistrate. So the book is detailed in its authenticity and observation. It's not invented by someone who hasn't been there.

"The village was called Beddagama, which means the village in the jungle. It lay in the low country plains, midway between the sea and the great mountains which seem, far away to the north, to rise like a long wall straight up from the sea of trees. It was in, and of, the jungle; the air and smell of the jungle lay heavy upon it - the smell of hot air, of dust, and of dry and powdered leaves and sticks..."

Perhaps this is why the book is so well known in Sri Lanka - it's seen as a sociological or ethnographic description of south-east Ceylon in the early 1900s - and almost completely neglected in Britain. It's not part of the literature of Imperial Adventure - there's no white hero finding King Solomon's Mines or a Treasure Island. It's not part of the literature of Imperial Derangement either. There's no Mr Kurtz, driven mad by the atrocities of enslavement, as in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The Village in the Jungle is different because it's not about Us, but wholly about Them. It was very advanced in 1913, when many people in Europe were racist.

Leonard Woolf said that his experience of empire made him a liberal, and his later witnessing of poverty in the East End of London made him a socialist. He worked with the Co-Operative movement, became a Fabian and wrote a book in 1916, International Government, which influenced the founders of the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations. There followed other works on economics and imperialism and a five-volume autobiography before he died in 1969.

But of all Leonard Woolf's works, the slim volume The Village in the Jungle will probably live the longest. It was written 10 years before the far better-known novel of imperial cross-purposes by his friend EM Forster, A Passage to India, and 20 years before George Orwell's critique of empire, Burmese Days, based on his experiences as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police. The book represents a shift in 20th Century consciousness - from north to south, from top to bottom, from ruler to ruled, from agent to acted upon. It shines the light of intelligent sympathy on the desperately benighted, the world's poor.

Siddhartha Gautama-Bhiksu University

Siddhartha Gautama was born in the 5th or 6th century BC in Lumbini, which is known as Nepal in the modern day. Siddhartha is a Sanskrit name meaning "one who has accomplished a goal" and Gautama is a family name.

His father, King Suddhodana, was the leader of a large clan called the Shakya . It is not clear from the earliest texts whether he was a hereditary king or more of a tribal chief. It is also possible that he was elected to this status.

 Suddhodana married two sisters, Maya and Pajapati Gotami. They are said to be princesses of another clan, the Koliya from what is northern India today. Maya was the mother of Siddhartha and he was her only child, dying shortly after his birth. Pajapati, who later became the first Buddhist nun, raised Siddhartha as her own.

By all accounts, Prince Siddhartha and his family were of the Kshatriya caste of warriors and nobles.  Among Siddhartha's more well-known relatives was his cousin Ananda, the son of his father's brother. Ananda would later become the Buddha's disciple and personal attendant.

Anuradhapura City -Bhiksu University Anuradhapura

Sri Lanka’s historical chronicle, the Mahavamsa, records that Anuradhapura first became the capital of ancient Lanka in 4^th Century BC, during the reign of King Pandukhabaya. The King is attributed with designing the city, developing a core town and even surrounding suburbs based on a highly complex plan.

Anuradhapura came into prominence after Buddhism was introduced to the island in the 3^rd Century BC during the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa. He built the country’s first stupa here, the Thuparama, which is said to house a relic of the Buddha, his right collarbone. King Tissa also arranged for the planting of the sacred Bo sapling brought to the country by Princess Sangamitta, daughter of Emperor Asoka of India. This is today the venerated Sri Maha Bodhi, which is considered the oldest living tree in the world.

University College Anuradhapura Semester-1 Examination 26.04.2018

Aquaculture

Diagram of a fish  

Parts of a fish

Students can visit my Face Book for more information.

Aloysius College 22, Jaffna Road, Anuradhapura GCE AL Literature

The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake

In 1789, the year of the beginning of the French Revolution, Blake brought out his Songs of Innocence, which included The Chimney Sweeper. The poem is in first person, a very young chimney sweeper is exposing the evils of chimney sweeping as a part of the cruelties created by sudden increase in wealth.  The poem was used as propaganda against the evil of Chimney Sweeping. The Chimney Sweeper’s life was one of destitution and exploitation. The large houses created by the wealth of trade had horizontal flues heating huge rooms which could be cleaned only by a small child crawling through them. These flues literally became black coffins, which killed many little boys. A sweeper’s daily task was courting death because of the hazards of suffocation and burns. These children were either orphans or founding or were sold by poor parents to Master Sweepers for as little as two guineas. They suffered from cancers caused by the soot, and occasionally little children terrified of the inky blackness of the Chimneys got lost within them and only their skeletons were recovered.

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

In these twenty-four lines of William Blake’s poem, The Chimney Sweeper, a little boy, is telling the story of his despairing life as well as the sad tales of other chimney’s sweeper boys. The little boy narrates that he was very young when his mother died. He was then sold by his father to a Master Sweeper when his age was so tender that he could not even pronounce the word ‘sweep’ and crying pronounced it ‘weep’ and wept all the time. The pun intended through the use of word ‘weep’ three times in the third line of this stanza holds pathetic significance. Most chimney sweepers, like him, were so young that they could not pronounce sweep and lisped ‘weep’. Since that tender age the little boy is sweeping chimney and sleeping at night in the soot-smeared body, without washing off the soot.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved, so I said,

“Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

In the second stanza, the little narrator tells us the woeful tale of Tom Dacre. This is a very famous character in Blake’s many poems. Tom was called ‘Dacre’ because he belonged to Lady Dacre’s Almshouse, which was situated between St. James Street and Buckingham Road. The inmates of the Almshouse were foundling orphans, who were allowed to be adopted by the poor only. It may be a foster father who encased the boy Tom by selling him to a Master Sweeper. Tom wept when his head was shaved, just as the back of a lamb is shaved for wool. The narrator then told Tom not to weep and keep his peace. The narrator told Tom to be calm because lice will not breed in the pate without hair and there will be no risk for hair to catch fire.

And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black?

The third stanza continues the story of Tom who was calmed by the consoling words of the narrator. That same night while sleeping Tom saw a wonderful vision. He saw in his dream that many Chimney sweepers, who were named Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack, were dead and their bodies were lying in caged coffins, made of black-colored wood.

And by came an Angel, who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins & set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

In the fourth stanza, the vision is completed. An Angel, who was carrying a shining key, came near the coffins. The Angel opened the coffins containing the bodies and set all the bodies free from the bondage of coffins. The freed little sweepers of the chimney ran down a green ground, washed themselves in the water of a river and dried themselves in the sunlight to give out a clean shine.  This was really a very delightful moment for these chimney sweepers, who got freed from the shackles of bondage labor, exploitation and child labor.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,

He’d have God for his father & never want joy.

In the fifth stanza, the little boy continues narrating the dream vision of Tom. All the little boys were naked and white after washing. They were naked because their bags of clothes were left behind. They cast off the burden of life along with the bags of soot at the time of death.  Now naked and white, the little chimney sweeper boys ride the clouds and play in the wind. The image of clouds floating freely is Blake’s metaphor for the freedom from the material boundaries of the body and an important visual symbol. The Angel told Tom that if he would be a good boy he would have God for his father and there would never be lack of happiness for him.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

In the last stanza of Blake’s poem, The Chimney Sweeper, the narrator tells that Tom woke up and his dream vision broke up. Tom and other little sweeper boys rose up from their beds in the dark. They made themselves ready to work taking their bags for soot and the brushes to clean chimney. The morning was cold, but Tom, after the dream, was feeling warm and happy.

In the last line of the poem, a moral has been thrown to us: If all do their duty, they need not fear any harm. The last stanza shows the reality of the sweepers’ life. The antithesis between the vision of summer sunshine and this dark, cold reality is deeply ironic. Even though the victims have been mollified, the readers know that innocent trust is abused.

The Chimney Sweeper consists of six quatrains, each following the AABB rhyme scheme, with two rhyming couplets per quatrain. Through this poem, the poet sheds light on the pitiable condition of the chimney sweepers who were being exploited by their Masters.

This is a poem which describes the rampant bondage labor, child labor, exploitation of children at tender age, and the pitiable condition of the orphaned children or the poor children who were sold by their poor parents.

In all, this poem sarcastically attacks the advanced societies that keep their eyes shut toward these children, but act as being generous among their near and dear ones by holding or attending some charity shows/functions for the poor and down-trodden people in their country. Moreover, it is surprising to note here that these social evils even today prevail in our society.

Aloysius College No.22, Jaffna Road, Anuradhapura-GCE (AL. Literature-2019/20)

The Chimney Sweeper

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet; and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

 “The Chimney Sweeper,” a poem of six quatrains, accompanied by William Blake’s illustration, appeared in Songs of Innocence in 1789, the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution, and expresses Blake’s revolutionary fervor. It exposes the appalling conditions of the boys known as climbing boys, whose lot had been brought to public attention, but had been only marginally improved by the 1788 Chimney Sweepers’ Act. Blake published a companion poem in Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794.

The speaker is a young chimney sweeper, presumably six or seven years old, and the style is appropriately simple. Much of the imaginative power of the poem comes from the tension between the child’s naïveté and the subtlety of Blake’s own vision.

In the first stanza, the sweeper recounts how he came to this way of life. His mother—always in Blake’s work the warm, nurturing parent—having died, he was sold as an apprentice by his father, the stern figure of authority. His present life revolves around working, calling through the streets for more work, and at the end of the day sleeping in soot, a realistic detail since the boys did indeed make their beds on bags of the soot they had swept from chimneys.

The second stanza introduces Tom Dacre, who comes to join the workers and is initiated into his new life by a haircut. As Tom cries when his head is

"The Chimney Sweeper" is the title of a poem by William Blake, published in two parts in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of experience in 1794. The poem "The Chimney Sweeper" is set against the dark background of child labour that was prominent in England in the late 18th and 19th century. At the age of four and five, boys were sold to clean chimneys, due to their small size. These children were oppressed and had a diminutive existence that was socially accepted at the time. In the earlier poem, a young chimney sweeper recounts a dream had by one of his fellows, in which an angel rescues the boys from coffins and takes them to a sunny meadow; in the later poem, an apparently adult speaker encounters a child chimney sweeper abandoned in the snow while his parents are at church or possibly even suffered death where church is referring to being with God.

In 'The Chimney Sweeper' of Innocence, Blake can be interpreted to criticise the view of the Church that through work and hardship, reward in the next life would be attained; this results in an acceptance of exploitation observed in the closing lines 'if all do their duty they need not fear harm.' Interestingly, Blake uses this poem to highlight the dangers of an innocent, naive view, demonstrating how this allows the societal abuse of child labour.

In Experience, 'The Chimney Sweeper' further explores this flawed perception of child labour in a corrupt society. The poem shows how the Church's teachings of suffering and hardship in this life in order to attain heaven are damaging, and 'make up a heaven' of the child's suffering, justifying it as holy. Interestingly, the original questioner of the child ('Where are thy father and mother'?) offers no help or solution to the child, demonstrating the impact these corrupt teachings have had on society as a whole.

The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake

Aloysius College

No.22, Jaffna Road, Anuradhapura-GCE (AL. Literature-2019/20)

 “The Chimney Sweeper,” a poem of six quatrains, accompanied by William Blake’s illustration, appeared in Songs of Innocence in 1789, the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution, and expresses Blake’s revolutionary fervor. It exposes the appalling conditions of the boys known as climbing boys, whose lot had been brought to public attention, but had been only marginally improved by the 1788 Chimney Sweepers’ Act. Blake published a companion poem in Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794. The speaker is a young chimney sweeper, presumably six or seven years old, and the style is appropriately simple. Much of the imaginative power of the poem comes from the tension between the child’s naïveté and the subtlety of Blake’s own vision.

In the first stanza, the sweeper recounts how he came to this way of life. His mother—always in Blake’s work the warm, nurturing parent—having died, he was sold as an apprentice by his father, the stern figure of authority. His present life revolves around working, calling through the streets for more work, and at the end of the day sleeping in soot, a realistic detail since the boys did indeed make their beds on bags of the soot they had swept from chimneys. The second stanza introduces Tom Dacre, who comes to join the workers and is initiated into his new life by a haircut. As Tom cries when his head is

"The Chimney Sweeper" is the title of a poem by William Blake, published in two parts in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of experience in 1794. The poem "The Chimney Sweeper" is set against the dark background of child labour that was prominent in England in the late 18th and 19th century. At the age of four and five, boys were sold to clean chimneys, due to their small size. These children were oppressed and had a diminutive existence that was socially accepted at the time. In the earlier poem, a young chimney sweeper recounts a dream had by one of his fellows, in which an angel rescues the boys from coffins and takes them to a sunny meadow; in the later poem, an apparently adult speaker encounters a child chimney sweeper abandoned in the snow while his parents are at church or possibly even suffered death where church is referring to being with God.

In 'The Chimney Sweeper' of Innocence, Blake can be interpreted to criticize the view of the Church that through work and hardship, reward in the next life would be attained; this results in an acceptance of exploitation observed in the closing lines 'if all do their duty they need not fear harm.' Interestingly, Blake uses this poem to highlight the dangers of an innocent, naive view, demonstrating how this allows the societal abuse of child labour.

In Experience, 'The Chimney Sweeper' further explores this flawed perception of child labour in a corrupt society. The poem shows how the Church's teachings of suffering and hardship in this life in order to attain heaven are damaging, and 'make up a heaven' of the child's suffering, justifying it as holy. Interestingly, the original questioner of the child ('Where are thy father and mother'?) offers no help or solution to the child, demonstrating the impact these corrupt teachings have had on society as a whole.