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.
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.
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