In William Blake’s poems “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence and “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Experience, the reader is able to understand the viewpoints of children treated unfairly. The Songs of Innocence version of the poem, written in 1789, describes how a boy helps a fellow chimney sweeper find comfort despite their struggles. This boy then dreams about an angel that sets sweepers like him free and how they find happiness in their freedom. In his dream, the boy learns that if he will “be a good boy,” he will find salvation in God. The Songs of Experience version, written five years later, is about a boy that seems happy so his parents think they have not done any wrong to him. The boy’s parents are “gone up to the church to pray” while he is clothed in “the clothes of death” and taught to sing sorrowfully. Both poems allude to the religious aspect of the Romantic Period, leading to their theme of redemption. The theme of redemption is shown in the exploitation of children depicted in the poems, the use of symbolism throughout each, and the inevitable loss of innocence.
There is a clear issue of children exploitation in both of William Blake’s poems as it relates to the theme of redemption. In “The Chimney Sweeper” (Innocence), the strength of the desire for redemption shows how extreme the child exploitation must have been. In “The Chimney Sweeper” (Experience), the speaker depicts how his exploitation is related to his parents’ efforts to earn their redemption. England was rapidly developing between 1750 and 1820 due to the Industrial Revolution, strengthening the Romantic Era. During this time, there was an extreme shortage of labor force which required young children to work. Parents began to use thei...
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...ke’s poems help readers to view the different ways people reach and find comfort in redemption, but also how some can be completely ignorant of it.
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Blake's View on Oppression of Children by Adults Blake was a poet who wrote in the Romantic period. He had idealistic views about life, and believed that the traditional country way of life was the best way to live. He despised the industry that was establishing itself in England because it was the opposite of the ideal country lifestyle that Blake idealised. The idea that Blake believed that children were oppressed is an interesting one, because, there are a number of poems which suggest different ideas about this topic.
Adults with authority and experience are responsible for destroying innocence of childhood. Blake’s narrator is presumably from the world of experience, and has the ability to communicate the injustice taking place. “They think they have done me no injury/ And are gone to praise God and his priest and king/ Who make up a heaven of our misery” (10-12). Blake proves that those with power are committing hypocrisy. Religious doctrine does not save children from misery. Rather, religion is used to imprison and trap children into obedience. Once experience beings to awaken within, the child will realize that he has been wronged. Nevertheless, he will do nothing because of the rigorous conditioning carried out by hypocritical
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Hardy, Thomas. “The Ruined Maid” Literature and the Writing Process. 9th ed. Eds. Elizabeth McMahan et al. Boston: Longman, 2011. 467 - 468. Print.
William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” was mainly about the possibilities of both hope and faith. Although the poem’s connotation is that of a very dark and depressed nature, the religious imagery Blake uses indicates that the sweeps will have a brighter future in eternity.
Starting with the first stanza, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. He uses words such as died, weep, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child shares his family with us, stating his mother’s death and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”(Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child getting tossed into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “weep”, instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”(3). The fact that the child cried “weep” instead of sweep shows that the child could not be any older than four. Blake describes that they sleep in soot also meaning they are sleeping in their death bed. The average life span of children who work in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh work environment. The child portrays sorrow in the last line of the first stanza “So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”(4)
Blake's poems of innocence and experience are a reflection of Heaven and Hell. The innocence in Blake's earlier poems represents the people who will get into Heaven. They do not feel the emotions of anger and jealousy Satan wants humans to feel to lure them to Hell. The poems of experience reflect those feelings. This is illustrated by comparing and contrasting A Divine Image to a portion of The Divine Image.
In the poem, The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake (1789), the poet attempts to shine a light on the social injustice inflicted upon children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free them from their nightmare existence. He uses a child’s voice as the vehicle to deliver his message in order to draw attention to the injustice of forced child labor. The speaker is a young boy whose mother has passed away. He has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and his father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake cleverly uses sound, imagery, irony, and symbolism in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane treatment and exploitation inflicted upon young children by forcing them into the chimneys.
When Blake was inspired to write about these boys, their barbaric lives were not only common knowledge, but accepted. Throughout the passing years, however, history has lost sight of the horror they faced everyday. Therefore, familiarity with such details does help the reader to see more clearly Blake's indictment of a society that allows children to be subjected to almost unbelievable wretched conditions, and it also gives more force and point to the realism and imagery. (Nurmi, 15) History reveals that children usually began these lives at the age of 6 or 7 or even earlier. The job tormented their small bodies, leaving them to die with deformed ankles, twisted kneecaps and spines, or with "chimney sweeps cancer." The boys began their days long before sunrise until about noon when they "cried the streets" for more business. When it was time to return these young boys carried heavy bags of soot to the cellars and attics where they slept. Even the task of sleeping was torture. The boys owned nothing and were given nothing, leaving them with only the bags of soot that had swept for a bed.
Though this poem mainly describes the suffering of these children, William Blake wrote another poem also titled “The Chimney Sweeper” where he described how as these chimney-sweepers grew older, they began to realize how they were taken advantage of and how the promises of the Church were all just a big hoax. From these two poems, it can be inferred that Blake intentionally pointed out and revealed the malfeasance of the Church and society and how they exploited younger children due to their gullibility and innocence solely for the economy without having any regard for the children’s lives.
In both chimney sweepers we can see how William Blake explains the virtues and limitations of innocence and experience. The fate of Chimney Sweepers was a cruel one. Little boys as young as six were often sold by families who could not afford to feed them and apprenticed to the trade. They were sent to terrified up the dangerous and dark chimney and, they dared refuse, they were frequently terrorized by their new masters, who I think would threatened them to the life of poverty and starvation from whence they had come.
Upon reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a certain parallel is easily discerned between them and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Blake, considered a radical thinker in his time, is today thought to be an important and seminal figure in the literature of the Romantic period. Being such a figure he has no doubt helped to influence many great thinkers throughout history, one of whom I believe is Carroll. There are many instances throughout Carroll’s story where comparable concepts of innocence and adulthood are evident. Through its themes of romanticism, Carroll crafts a story that is anti-didactic by its very nature.
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and his father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence.
The definition of children shifts depending on the person. To some the definition is a time without any worry, to others it is a more logical definition such as the period of time between infancy and adolescence. There are many different versions of this definition, and this is seen in the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth. These two authors have very different views on what it means to be a child and how they are portrayed in this era. Compared to now, Children in Blake’s eyes are seen as people that need guidance and need to be taught certain lessons by their parents such as religious, moral, and ethical values. In contrast to Blake’s view, Wordsworth viewed that adults should be more like children. That sometimes