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Symbolism in the chimney sweeper by blake
William Blake's portrayal of children in songs of innocence and experience
William Blake's portrayal of children in songs of innocence and experience
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Innocence and Experience in Blake's The Chimney Sweeper
The most obvious difference between the two poems would be the length,
although this is not necessarily a difference between innocence and
experience, it does lure the reader into the right frame of mind to
read into the attitude of each poem. Innocence consists of six,
four-line stanzas, where as experience is only three, four-line
stanzas. The length of each line is also longer in innocence when
compared to experience. When you examine what each of the poems is
portraying, this seems like an effective way to draw a distinctive
line between the two.
Innocence begins in a slightly depressing tone, informing us from a
child's first person perspective that he was sold by his family before
he had learnt to speak properly. Blake then plays on the word 'sweep',
which a young chimney sweeper would have to shout in the streets, and
turns it into 'weep'. The repetative use of the word 'weep!' is ironic
and reflects the mood of the opening stanza.
The second stanza begins to relate to an indvidual boy's case, warming
the reader towards the poem more than the previous stanza. Blake
continues by telling us 'little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shaved'. The shaving of this boy's
head invokes a sympathetic response to the situation. Also, the
comparison between the boy's hair and a lamb has a religious meaning
behind it, Jesus is often refered to as "the lamb of god", the
religious references in this poem, when observed on a whole, would
initially force the assumption that Blake is praising religion. At the
end of this paragraph, Tom Dacre's...
... middle of paper ...
...his poem was taken away from the 'winter's snow', snow being white,
and 'clothed in the clothes of death, and taught to sing the notes of
woe'. The clothes of death are the soot-covered rags of a chimney
sweeper, and the notes of woe are the words 'weep, weep'.
The last stanza of experience is easily the most powerful, the chimney
sweeper directly tells an unknown party that his parents have 'gone to
praise God and his Priest and King, Who make up a heaven of our
misery'. This is the clearest message Blake has given. The way
religion has been warped and abused by society, the king and Church,
is purely self-beneficial and holds no regard to the wellbeing, or
misery, of the majority of people. These two lines can be adapted to
the Innocene poem, which would lead one to read it in the same style
as the Experience poem.
The fact that they feel they can sit about the knee of their mother, in this stereotypical image of a happy family doesn’t suggest that the children in this poem are oppressed... ... middle of paper ... ... y has a negative view of the childish desire for play which clearly has an effect on the children. The fact that they the are whispering shows that they are afraid of the nurse, and that they cannot express their true thoughts and desires freely, which is why they whisper, and therefore shows that Blake feels that children are oppressed. I feel that the two poems from innocence which are ‘The Echoing Green,’ and ‘The Nurses Song,’ display Blake’s ideological view of country life which I referred to in my introduction, and show his desire for childhood to be enjoyed.
Blake also uses sound to deliver the meaning to the poem. The poem starts off with "My mother groaned! my father wept." You can hear the sounds that the parents make when their child has entered this world. Instead of joyful sounds like cheer or cries of joy, Blake chooses words that give a meaning that it is not such a good thing that this baby was brought into this world. The mother may groan because of the pain of delivery, but she also groans because she knows about horrible things in this world that the child will have to go through. The father also weeps for the same reason, he knows that the child is no longer in the safety of the womb, but now is in the world to face many trials and tribulations.
In Blake’s poem “The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence, Blake proves that in order to keep innocence alive, a child must not question. It is in a child’s nature to trust all that has been told. Therefore the lamb represents childhood as well as innocence. The lamb is personified as being a gentle creature without sin, and the poem itself is characterized by pleasant light imagery. This imagery is an indicator that innocence is a desired state of being. In the first stanza of the poem, the narrator asks questions regarding
William Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper" gives us a look into the unfortunate lives of 18th century London boys whose primary job was to clear chimneys of the soot that accumulated on its interior; boys that were named "climbing boys" or "chimney sweepers." Blake, a professional engraver, wrote this poem (aabb rhyme), in the voice of a young boy, an uneducated chimney sweeper. This speaker is obviously a persona, a fictitious character created by Blake, as it is apparent that he wasn't a child or a chimney sweeper at the time he wrote this poem.
Blake’s poetry focuses on imagination. When Blake created his work, it gained very little attention. Blake’s artistic and poetic vision is reflected in his creations. Blake was against the Church of England because he thought the doctrines were being misused as a form of social control, it meant the people were taught to be passively obedient and accept oppression, poverty, and inequality. In Blake’s poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell, he shows that good requires evil in order to exist through imagery of animals and man.
In lines 4 – 8 when Blake writes, “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.’ These lines symbolize faith in the biblical sense. Young Tom’s is like that of the sacrificial lamb of God and when the narrator tells Tom to stop crying because he knows that the soot can not longer spoil his white hair he, is saying to Tom, once he makes this sacrifice nothing else can hurt him. Blake is saying that if the children make the sacrifice of living out their lives here on Earth, no matter how dark and dismal their lives may seem at the time, they will be rewarded in heaven as long as they know the glory of God and trust in him.
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)
who are at the center of his work? If they are Contraries, then what does the
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
The first piece of evidence by Blake that identifies the pressure of society placed upon the children is Blake’s particular use of rhyme scheme. Starting with the last two lines of the first stanza of the poem, Blake immediately jumps in to depict his disparaging opinion of society by enforcing the lack of parental protection present for these chimney-sweeping children. The rhyming lines, “I was very young/ … yet my tongue” (3-4) introduce the idea that this individual (the speaker of the poem) was so young and innocent that he could not only say the word “sweep,” but more importantly, that he also could not stand up for himself even against his own father, and oppose the job that he was forcefully sold in to. This particular example demonstrates how vulnerable these children were to society and how they could be easily abused and oppressed. While the first stanza may seem to directly coincide ...
It is fascinating how far the world has transformed in the past 300 years. The world has evolved in the way labor is accomplished. The innovation of machines, abolishment of slavery and child labor laws have all played a part in this history. 300 years ago, slaves were the main force of labor because they were cheap. Economically, the next major force of labor was the children. Since children were smaller, they were able to do jobs that adults could not, such as sweep chimneys. This was a terrible job for children to be doing. William Blake writes about how miserable the kids were in two poems, “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence), and “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Experience.) In both poems the kids were not happy with the situation they were in because of the harsh conditions. Child labor is extremely harmful to children, and Blake realized how dangerous it was. He criticizes the King, the Church, and the parents for their contribution to a child’s misery. It is evident that parents would force
The Song of Innocence and Experience is a collection of poems written by William Blake. “Innocence” and “Experience” are two definitions of consciousness that rethink John Milton’s existential-mythic states of “Paradise” and the “Fall”, this coincides with the romantic notion that adolescence is a state of protected innocence instead of original sin and yet is still not immune to the fallen world and its institutions.
In the William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the vision of children and adults are placed in opposition of one another. Blake portrays childhood as a time of optimism and positivity, of heightened connection with the natural world, and where joy is the overpowering emotion. This joyful nature is shown in Infant Joy, where the speaker, a newborn baby, states “’I happy am,/ Joy is my name.’” (Line 4-5) The speaker in this poem is portrayed as being immediately joyful, which represents Blake’s larger view of childhood as a state of joy that is untouched by humanity, and is untarnished by the experience of the real world. In contrast, Blake’s portrayal of adulthood is one of negativity and pessimism. Blake’s child saw the most cheerful aspects of the natural wo...
Now Blake introduces a new character into the poem, which is Tom Dacre (ln 5). In the second stanza, Blake is stating the mortality, or unhappiness of Tom. The author’s tone changes for a moment in stanza two when he says “Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare, the soot cannot spoil your white hair”, (ln 7-8). The author has two meanings in these lines. The obvious is that he can’t have hair for the fact that his hair would be full of soot. The tone change comes in where the meaning is not so obvious. The tone up to line six is mournful. Lines seven and eight also have a mournful tone in the obvious state. They connote that Tom needs to keep his head up and not let his job get to him, or simply to keep hope alive.
The idea of the child’s innocence is shown through their interactions with others and their descriptions in both of these writers’ poems. For example, in the introduction to “Songs of Innocence” the interaction between the child and the narrator depicts the amount of innocence he has for laughing and enjoying life up in a tree while telling the narrator to write about merry cheer and the Lamb. This example shows innocence because innocent children are usually the happiest for they do not know as many of the horrors of life yet. The child being in a tree relates to Wordsworth’s religious view of being one with nature and how children are delightful and free. Another example of childhood innocence, is in William Blake’s poem “Holy Thursday” he refers to the children as innocent looking and having clean faces. When the children are described as being clean or having something of the color white that usually means purity and innocence. Since Blake wrote many of his passages on religion, the color white also has to do with the purity of the soul and being free from sin. Another example of this would be in “The Chimney Sweeper” when the little boy lost his white hair, this refers to the child losing his innocence or