Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Blake's criticism of the church
William Blake and his religious point of view
Bleak ideas about innocence and experience
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Blake's criticism of the church
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.
Sweeps would most likely suffered from cancer from exposure to soot, along with respiratory diseases, broken bones and stunted growth. Sweeps usually chose the chimney over starvation but whatever choice they made, their lives were haunted by a fear of death. Many critics said that “Chimney Sweepers was inspired by agitation which was then trying to pass laws against the use of children as chimney sweepers” (Damon 269). By comparing Blake’s two ‘Chimney Sweepers’ poems, we can get some of his
…show more content…
The conditions that the adult sees the child is naked dirty in the snow. Now this is the parents’ responsibilities for selling him to the masters of Chimney Sweepers. The kids wouldn’t had this problem of being outside naked and dirty in the snow if the parents would’ve stayed with their and tried to survive,
The fourth Limitation of Experience is that it has learn the lesson of hypocrisy. In the last line of the poem, Tom implies that church profits from the miserable life that he leads and therefore makes up a heaven of their misery “Who make up a heaven of our misery” (Blake 915). I believe that Blake’s implies that social problems are intimately connected with spiritual problems. Just as the child’s parents fail to perceive his misery, so they fail to perceive the lack of spiritual truth in the doctrines and practices of the
It was times throughout the book the reader would be unsure if the children would even make it. For example, “Lori was lurching around the living room, her eyebrows and bangs all singed off…she had blisters the length of her thighs”(178).Both Lori and Jeannette caught fire trying to do what a parent is supposed to do for their child. Jeannette caught fire at the age of three trying to make hotdogs because her mother did not cook for her leaving Jeannette to spend weeks hospitalized. She was burnt so bad she had to get a skin graft, the doctors even said she was lucky to be alive. The children never had a stable home. They were very nomadic and a child should be brought up to have one stable home. No child should remember their childhood constantly moving. This even led to Maureen not knowing where she come from because all she can remember is her moving. The children had to explain to her why she looked so different is because where she was born. They told Maureen “she was blond because she’d been born in a state where so much gold have been mined, and she had blue eyes the color of the
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1964.
Ella Blake was born on May 4th, 2004 ( also known as Star Wars Day, May the Forth be with you.) in Rensselaer, Indiana. She first realized she had a gift for music when her sister, Ruby Blake, was in 6th grade and joined band. Ruby joined band and started playing the clarinet. Ella was only 7 or 8 at the time due to her sister being 4 years older, but Ruby introduced Ella to the instrumental world. She would ask Ella's opinion on how she was doing on a song and Ella would have to listen to her sister play and try to find sounds she didn't think we're supposed to be there. Around 3 years later Ruby entered high school and quit band, instead of doing marching band, but Ella's Older brother joined band that year. He plays
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
The difference in the time periods of these two poems is crucial, as it severely alters the upbringing of the characters, their social projection, their self-image, and the types of problems that they face. The upbringing of children often has a great deal to do with their mental health and how they portray themselves to others as they grow older. After she mutilates herself in an attempt to make herself look beautiful, others take notice and comment on how pretty her corpse looks laying in the casket. In The Chimney Sweeper, the young chimney sweep finds enough hope in religion to keep him going.
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.
In Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794), William Blake arouses readers' minds and leads them into a path of finding their own answers and conclusions to his poems. He sets up his poems in the first book, Songs of Innocence, with a few questions as if they were asked from a child's perspective since children are considered the closest representation of innocence in life. However, in the second book, Songs of Experience, Blake's continues to write his poems about thought-provoking concepts except the concepts happen to be a little bit more complex and relevant to experience and time than Songs of Innocence.
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.
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.
During the British Romantic period, some writers used material from the Bible or imitated the Bible in style of writing or content. William Blake, a Romantic writer, engraver, and painter, believed that “the Bible was the greatest work of poetry ever written” (Barker 2004). The Bible influenced him throughout this life, specifically influencing both his writing and his art. There are many references to Biblical themes within his writing, and there are also many references to specific passages of Scripture (Barker 2004).
Both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience provide social criticism on the dangers that child chimney sweepers endure but, Songs of Experience provides better social commentary as Songs of Experience directly identifies the potential for death unlike Songs of Innocence which implicitly identifies the dangers child sweeps endure. In Songs of Innocence, the child chimney sweeper dreams that while he was “lock’d up in coffins of black…an Angel who had a bright key… open’d the coffins…set them all free” (Blake, “Innocence” 12-14). The child’s dream of freedom appears happy and optimistic when in reality it is quite chilling that the child views death as freedom. Blake presents the child chimney sweeper as optimistic to suggest that society needs to help the children find freedom so they do not wish to die. The social commentary in Songs of Innocence is implicit in order to emphasize the child’s inability to fully understand and c...
Blake wrote two poems with entitled “Chimney Sweeper.” One version was found in his ‘Songs of Innocence’ and the other was found in ‘Songs of Experience.’ Although the first was told with a child almost in mind, and the second was told in a darker, colder point-of-view, they both contain the same concern. This concern is having very young children working as chimney sweepers. Blake talks about how you boys are almost forced into this career
When he writes “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” (Wordsworth), he writes about how growing up is filled with lies.
The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) is told from the point of view of a young chimney sweeper, this persona is put on by the poet and is established in the opening stanza when the boy says "So your chimneys I sweep..." this poem is almost told in the form of a narrative and it is about a young boy telling of how his mother died and it does not mention any other details of her death other than the fact that she perished while he was very young. Then, it is said that his father sold him into slavery “while yet my tongue could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!” this ultimately makes the audience feel very sympatric toward the boy and we can see that he has accepted his lot in life. But, this is also the first place in the poem where the opposing attitudes of the chimney sweeper and the poet are present. Initially, upon reading the poem all the reader thinks of is the poor little boy, but here the poet is being sarcastic as he is saying the boy was made into a chimney sweep before he could even say the word “sweep” in the case that the s- sound was left off and the word left his mouth as “ ‘weep” which is also why the he uses the repetition of the word to emphasize the child’s misery while im...
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.