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.