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The chimney sweeper by william blake meaning
Literature poverty essay
The chimney sweeper by william blake meaning
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Doing the household chores isn’t even difficult task to accomplish. Children your age have had to do much more strenuous chores, especially back in the late 18th century. “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake is a prime example of this. Blake’s poem talks about the hardships that come with working in the chimney’s and the mindsets of the young persons working in them.
Things like chores should be very trivial compared to the hardships and tasks the subjects of William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” face. “When my mother died I was very young,” and here you stand complaining about the dishes? Also, when the main subject says, “And my father sold me while yet my tongue,/ Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.” really puts life into perspective.
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A day of chores is nothing compared to a lifetime. Even if any of those boys survived their childhood working in the chimney’s their later lives would be more work. They would be either facing serious health problems from all the soot they encountered or they would be working intense and very difficult labour jobs.
To me the, the saddest part of the poem is when it says, “And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark/ And got with our bags & our brushes to work./ Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm./ So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”. This is because Tom realizes he’ll be happy once he dies, which is really how no child should ever feel. This is the last stanza in the poem and to me it left the largest impact. While children nowadays have the option to skip chores or take a break, they used to not.
So you see? You may think a couple hours worth of chores are the end of the world, but your life could be much worse. Blake used this poem to criticize the conditions of the poor chimney sweepers. No matter how bad of a day you’re having, realize how much worse it could be. If you worked as a chimney sweeper, you would be begging to do household
By rereading the poem several times, made me not only appreciate it, but understand it on a different level. Saenz did a great job at telling the story so that people can view it different ways. I enjoyed the poem because it clearly drew a picture in my mind of what he was talking about. At one point, I felt like I could see what he was talking about. I never acknowledged poems prior to this one because I felt that poems were too cheesy and corny. Instead of telling the story he made it a journey for the readers to get what he was saying. This poem shows how life was at the time and what people were surrounded with. Fortunately, many children are exposed to that today and are pushed in the right direction. All in all this poem was of the most interesting poems I've ever read and made me think harder than I ever would on any other
Fulfilling the roles of both mother and breadwinner creates an assortment of reactions for the narrator. In the poem’s opening lines, she commences her day in the harried role as a mother, and with “too much to do,” (2) expresses her struggle with balancing priorities. After saying goodbye to her children she rushes out the door, transitioning from both, one role to the next, as well as, one emotion to another. As the day continues, when reflecting on
Countless times throughout Robinson’s work, the idea of the home is used as a way to contrast society’s views, and what it means to the characters of Robinson’s novels. In Robinson’s most famous novel Housekeeping, two young girls experience life in a home built by their grandfather, but altered by every person that comes to care for them. After their mother
The poem also focuses on what life was like in the sixties. It tells of black freedom marches in the South how they effected one family. It told of how our peace officers reacted to marches with clubs, hoses, guns, and jail. They were fierce and wild and a black child would be no match for them. The mother refused to let her child march in the wild streets of Birmingham and sent her to the safest place that no harm would become of her daughter.
Patmore wrote that “Man must be pleased; but him to please is woman's pleasure.” This common concept of the nineteenth century reveals itself in this stanza. Women held one position in society, and it held constant throughout the eighteen hundreds: Please man. Ma, in The Little House series, is a prime example of the “Angel in the House.” Ma is always there for Pa. She realizes that he provides and she obeys. Ma, in The Little House in the Big Woods, had a schedule for each week. .She washed on Monday, Ironed on Tuesday, Mended on Wednesday, Churned on Thursday, Cleaned on Friday, and Baked on Saturday. On top of those chores, Ma prepared food and tended to Pa and the children. There wasn’t a day for Ma’s needs and desires. Ma presents herself as the stereotyp...
There are many factors that will shape a young boy’s life, but possibly none more important than the role of that boy’s father. Seamus Heaney and Theodore Roethke both have shown the importance of the father role in their poems “Digging” and “My Papas Waltz.” Although the roles of the fathers in these poems were different, the respect and admiration shown by their sons is one in the same. Weather it is Heaney’s father digging under his window, or Roehtke’s father dancing him around as a little boy, the love shown in these two poems, shows a direct relation on the lives they shared with their fathers.
The father in the story was a fox farmer. He raised foxes and when their fur was prime, he skinned them and sold their pelts for profit. Growing up, “the girl” sought for attention from her father, therefore, she began to enjoy helping him work outside with the foxes. “My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing … Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride.” Consequently, she began to dread working in the kitchen with her mother, and thus loss respect for her mother’s subservient position in the household. When describing her mother’s housework it was “endless” compared to her father’s work outside, which was “ritualistically important.” This obvious resentment for society’s womanly duties symbolizes the narrator’s desire to be more than “just a girl”.
In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the role of a woman in society is one of domestic duties. Jeenie, the protagonist’s sister-in-law, is a great example of this. The protagonist is forbidden, by her husband, to “work” until she is well again, so Jeenie steps in and assumes her domestic identity of a woman and wife. The protagonist calls her “a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper” and says she “hopes for no better profession” (Gilman 343). Jeenie clearly has no aspirations outside the confines of her domestic role. The protagonist herself worries she is letting her husband, John, down by not fulfilling her domestic duties. She says “it does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way” (Gilman 342). Besides the domestic role, which she is unable to fulfill, the protagonist plays the helpless, fragile, role of a woman where she is deemed incapable of thinking for herself and is reduced to acting more or les...
In the early 1900’s, around the time the story takes place; women were expected to be care takers of the home, to be clean, well dressed and mannered. All of these
The phrasing of this poem can be analyzed on many levels. Holistically, the poem moves the father through three types of emotions. More specifically, the first lines of the poem depict the father s deep sadness toward the death of his son. The line Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy creates a mental picture in my mind (Line 1). I see the father standing over the coffin in his blackest of outfits with sunglasses shading his eyes from the sun because even the sun is too bright for his day of mourning. The most beautiful scarlet rose from his garden is gripped tightly in his right hand as tears cascade down his face and strike the earth with a splash that echoes like a scream in a cave, piercing the ears of those gathered there to mourn the death of his son.
It is in lines 10 – 24 that the poem becomes one of hope. For when Blake writes “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;” Blake’s words ring true of hope for the sw...
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)
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Constraint is present in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and James Joyce’s “The Boarding House”. In both short stories, society has placed the main characters and their lives under its evil grip. All the characters live under a blanket of limitations that society has placed upon them and the short stories show their battle to break away from society’s constraints. Societal constraint is explored by both authors in order to convey along to the reader a message. This common theme for both short stories is used to show the grip society really has on us and how it affects different people.
The first stanza begins by stating, The children go forward . They are leaving their mothers behind, going to a place inaccessible to them. At the moment the children are on their way to school, but as they progress, they will begin to move past the achievements of their parents. Instead of becoming resentful, the mothers do all they can to ensure this progress continues. All morning the mothers have labored . They exert themselves strenuously for the benefit of their children. They put forth much time and energy at manual labor. The mothers labored in giving birth to their children, and are laboring to raise them to adulthood. They sacrifice themselves so that their children may have a future better than their own.