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William blake poems the chimney sweeper essay
Essays on Industrialization
William blake poems the chimney sweeper essay
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The Industrial Revolution was a crucial point in the history of the world, and also a very difficult time to endure, especially for the working class. In the late eighteenth century, a young poet and artist by the name of William Blake became outraged and inspired by the inhumane treatment of young boys called "chimney sweeps." Thus he produced a protest in the form of simple poetry. Wicksteed says, "Deeper knowledge of Blake will reveal no darkly buried meaning, only a deeper sense in the meaning obvious to all." (Hirsch, 7) This is precisely the case in the protest Blake calls "The Chimney Sweeper." Blake utilizes realism, rather than deep symbolism, in the form of imagery to portray the brutality of the Industrial Revolution.
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 the life was hard, it did not hold a candle to the actual duty of their job. Some chimneys were as small as seven inches in diameter, forcing the children to go up them naked. After all, clothes took up needed room and cost money to replace. Also bare skin, though it would bruise and scratch, did not catch on the rough plaster inside. This harshness on their bodies gave the boys such a dirty reputation that they were seen as subhuman creatures. Churches even turned the boys away and forbid them to enter the sanctuary.
The prominent theme that was exhibited throughout the novel was inhumanity. The quote "Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky." This quotation shows how a powerful authority had all the control to carry out disturbing actions and no common ma...
Public housing complexes were seen as pleasurable places. When the boys’ mother, LaJoe, first moved to Horner she was thirteen. The homes had white, freshly painted walls, new linoleum floors, closets you could hide in, and brand new appliances. The children went to dances in the basement, belonged to the girl scouts, and played outside on the playground surrounded by freshly planted grass. This harmonious sight all came to an abrupt end. The housing authority did not have the money or interest to put into the projects. They did not have much concern for low-income families and, therefore, the projects were neglected. The smell in the apartments became so bad that people thought dead fetuses were being flushed down the toilets. The appliances in the apartments hardly ever worked, so cooking was limited. After an inspection of the basement, over 2000 new and used appliances were found covered with rats, animal carcasses and excrements. The dead animals, paraphernalia, and female undergarments explained the smell lingering throughout the apartments.
Nature was not the only thing at risk during the Industrial Revolution. The social structure was being challenged by social justice leaders around the country. The feminist and abolition movements swept the nation, and the art scene. Artists took to showing the injustice of slavery through various paintings. Robert Duncanson’s painting Uncle Tom and Little Eva, shows the flawed logic of white supremacy.
The St. Jerome’s children of Indian Horse are innocent victims who suffer inexorably from threats, illness or suicide within both the Residential School and outside of it. Saul Indian Horse recalls seeing his schoolmates suffer right in front of his eyes. Saul describes ultimate acts to their suffering on page fifty-five “I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St. Jerome’s. I saw young boys and girls die standing on their own two feet. I saw bodies hung from the rafters on thin ropes.” These children are dying from maltreatment, malnutrition, neglect and oppression. If they do not die from an illness they must live on in misery and kill themselves; they just are not strong enough to move on. They cannot escape the pain of their maltreatment; their memories haunt their lives forever. The children who get out of the illness, death or beatings are not exempt from the religion and wrongful teachings that are imposed on them. Saul recalls these terrors on page eighty “We lived under constant threat. If it wasn’t the direct physical threat of beatings, the Iron Sister or vanishing, it was the dire threat of purgatory, hell and the everlasting agony their religion promised for the unclean, the heathen, the unsaved.” The Residential School System imposes a religion, discriminatory oppression and wrongful sanctions upon these children to push them
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.
In the beginning of the story one can see the teachings of the children. The children are laughing and playing around collecting stones preparing for the brutal stoning to come. The story describes a cheerful boy, “ducked under his mother’s grasping hand
The Industrial Era enabled wealth, prosperity, and advancement in American society. But behind the wealth of a few, the new skyscrapers lining big cities, and the influx of new people, the Industrial Era possessed many dark underbellies, such as labor. Factory owners and industry giants treated their employees poorly, and subjected them to long hours, crowded workspace, and dangerous conditions. This is best exemplified in the New York City’s Triangle factory fire. Often times the middle class reformers, the Progressives, are remembered for their work to ameliorate the working class. These supporters worked hard to cause change, but often the efforts of the factory workers themselves are forgotten. Political and economic change occurred because the poor gave the wealthy and educated people a cause and purpose to fight for. Without the original efforts of the rebellious
Circumstance and time can alter or determine the different paths a group of young boys will take. These paths can have the power to strip children of their own innocence. Such a statement can be explored in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” as it ventures into the pros and cons of human nature. William Golding’s tale begins with a group of English school boys who crash land on a deserted tropical island during World War II. In Lord of the Flies, the island that the boys crash on is beautiful, glamorous, and magnificent; yet, it proves to become a dystopia by the horror of the cruelty, violence, and inhumanity.
William Blake was one of those 19th century figures who could have and should have been beatniks, along with Rimbaud, Verlaine, Manet, Cezanne and Whitman. He began his career as an engraver and artist, and was an apprentice to the highly original Romantic painter Henry Fuseli. In his own time he was valued as an artist, and created a set of watercolor illustrations for the Book of Job that were so wildly but subtly colored they would have looked perfectly at home in next month's issue of Wired.
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)
He employed a brilliant approach as he took in the uncomfortable political and moral topics of his day and from them he created unique artistic representations. His poetry recounts in symbolic allegory the negative effects of the French and American revolutions and his visual art portrays the violence and sadistic nature of slavery. Blake was arguably one of the most stubbornly anti-oppression and anti-establishment writers in the English canon. Blake had an uncanny ability to use his work to illustrate the unpleasant and often painful realities around him. His poetry consistently embodies an attitude of revolt against the abuse of class and power that appears guided by a unique brand of spirituality.
The attitude of the chimney sweeper is one of hope and the speaker knows well that his hope will not be prevailed in this life but in the afterlife and we can see this as his attitude is portrayed with the diction that is used and the tone of jaded desertedness which leaves the mood at a very sympathetic place. This is opposed to the attitude of the poet as he expresses the boy’s lot in life by being very sarcastic and mocking him in the poem and this is present as we can see how he hyperbolizes the events in the boy’s life.
Hard times” by Charles dickens can be used as a unique insight into what England was like during the industrial revolution. “Hard times” use of setting and people to create picture of life in the nineteenth century. The narrator uses two major methods to illustrate the time to the reader. The way” hard times” shows the history of the industrial revolution is by describing the city of “Coketown.” In chapter five of “hard times” you can clearly see the time period come to life.
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 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. Right away in the first lines of the poem we learn through the child narrator that his life is about to change dramatically for the worse.
One is struck by the extreme cruelty and hardship he faced while only an emotionally vulnerable child and adolescent. As Wright generalizes his own experiences to show how the society functioned at the time, one may wonder how many individuals were crushed by similar circumstances.