I feel that this image perfectly describes the resentful tone of “The Chimney Sweeper” from Blake’s Songs of Experience. When looking at the young chimney sweeps above, I see one emotion in their facial expressions, sorrow. These kids are not even that dirty yet, which means that  From the line “Where are thy father and mother? Say? They are both gone up to the church to pray.”, I can deduce that for at least the author, either he feels that his parents put him in this miserable position as a chimney sweep, or that they actually did. I say that the poem has a resentful tone, this analysis comes from the lines “And because I am happy, and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury”. This is where the image above helps my understanding of the poem. The text shows sadness, but the image is better at conveying the full on sorrow and despair that author must feel. The text tells me that Blake wants revenge for what his parents have put him through, but the image says that a young chimney sweep would not have the energy to even think about exacting revenge on whoever forced them into work. Another difference between the text and the image is that the text calls the chimney sweep “A little black thing among the sun” in the opening line. Possibly, in the time from when the image is taken and the boys are clean, to when they are done with a days work and completely covered in soot, that they would garner such a resentment towards their parents that they would be motivated to stand up to them.

In William Blake’s poem The Chimney Sweeper from “Songs of Innocence” we read about the sad childhood of a boy who has just lost his mother, and is sold to be a chimney sweeper by his father. The image I chose below is of a happy chimney sweeper, I chose this image to portray the end of the poem. “And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, He’d have God for his father & never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.”  After all the suffering this boy went through he is eventually set free in the end by an ‘angel’. The day after being set free the angel comes back and tells the boy maybe the most important line in the poem, “If he’d be a good boy, He’d have god for his father and never want joy.” This line is very impactful and the next day we see how the boy and Tom get up to do work in the cold ( which is a very unpleasant thing) and it speaks about how they enjoy it. The image I have chose shows a man with pure joy on his face regardless of the fact that he seems to be a chimney sweeper. I imagine Tom and the boy after hearing that significant line from the angel to be just like this man with pure joy on his face while doing a choir that would be viewed as infuriating. The poem just like this image show how people who could be doing things that are viewed as a hassle and it shows them enjoying this. I think the image and poem are about finding happiness in the mundane and even annoying parts of life.

“The Little Black Boy” is a story of a “southern wild” born black child, who vouches for God and for the whiteness of his soul.  At the central of the above picture, the sunlight resembles the image of God in the third stanza of the poetry. The boy, through the stories of his mother, believes that heat and warmth stem from the sunlight of God; thus, every human beings deserves to receive them despite the difference in the colors of their skin. However, the more interesting aspect of the pictures lies in how the surrounding cloud prevents the light from reaching the earth. At the end of the fourth stanza, William Blake compares cloud as “black bodies” and “sun burnt faces”. This analogy is intriguing, for if cloud blocks sunlight away from earth, then black perhaps is that cloud that kept God and happiness away from color-skinned people. Even though the boy was born with evident awareness that

“White as an angel is the English child:

But I am black as if bereaved of light”

, his mother taught him to believe in the day when humans are black and white “cloud free”, they will rejoice. Overall, “The Little Black Boy” may first appear as William Blake’s implement to criticize racial inequality of the 18^th century society. Nonetheless in using the boy’s innocent perspective, the author posted his sanguine desire for a future of empathy between people from different colors, as he clearly stated in the end – “And be like him and he will then love me.”

After I read this poem, I did some research online. It is hard for me to understand this short poem fully from the surface. As we know, William Black has two collection songs of innocence and of experience. “The Lamb” is from songs of Innocence. From this poem, I can see some words, like delight and rejoice, and those make this enjoyable. “little lamb, who made thee?”, William Black keep asking this question in the poem and answer by a sentence. “For he calls himself a lamb, he is meek & he is mild.” So I think Jesus creates lamb and presents himself as lamb. Also, Jesus tries to use lamb to reflect himself, he is mild and meek. William Blake though this poem to express his perspective on Jesus, and this poem is like a child’s song, it uses two parts to state question and answer. The image above shows the relationship between Jesus and lamb, also give an answer to the question.

The poems, The Chimney Sweeper I &II talks about the poor lives suffered by the children who work as child labor in the old days in England. I pick this picture because this is the true image of the time and the people.  Due to poverty, these children were sold to factories from their parents and start suffer a miserable life at a very young age.  They were not even given a chance to change what they’d offered.

In the picture, these four boys may just get off work, or in the middle of their work, stand in front of a camera but have no idea why the photographer taking a photo of them.  From their face I cannot see the same face that children have in 2016, instead, I see faces with numbness, fatigue, mess, and mature far beyond their age.  This picture helps me better understand when the poet wrote “Could scarcely cry ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep” and “That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, were all of them locked up in coffins of black.”

However, in fourth stanza, there is an angel appears.  This angel is the difference between the picture and the poem. From fourth stanza to the end of the poem, the children are gone from the darkness of the hell, and follow the angel live their life with happiness.  Once they wake up from the dream, although still miserable, they will believe God will be there to help everyone to make the dream true.  On the contrary, the image I choose, shows the pale faces with hopeless.

When reading, “London,” by William Blake, the first image that came to my mind was that of a crowded New York City subway. William opens this poem by talking about the, “Marks of weakness” and “Marks of woe,” that he observes in people as he passes by them on a street. In the short stroll Blake took down the street, he was able to identify how each person he encountered was feeling. He paints a depressing picture because he described everybody to be discontent. This triggered the image of a crowded subway system to appear in my head. I take the subway on a daily basis and my experience is similar to the one that Blake has on the street. In a subway cart that can only hold so many people, it is easy to look around and see how miserable most people on the train are feeling.

As Blake proceeds, he never offers a resolution in his poem or an alternative for the negativity he experiences. Instead, he continues to talk about the depressing things he’s seeing. For example, “But most thro’ midnight streets I hear how the youthful Harlot’s curse. Blasts the new born infants tear, and blights with plague the marriage hearse.” This made it even easier to picture the image of a subway system. As the day progresses, nothing about the subway system becomes more enjoyable. What you experience during the daytime only becomes worse and more serious and William Blake experiences the same on his walk through the London Street.

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“The Lamb” by William Blake is from “From Songs of Innocence”. It is a poem that consists of two stanzas, five couplets each, that follow an AABB rhyme scheme. This is a symbolic poem that relates the lambs to God the Creator. Lambs are known to be gentle and meek creatures. The connection and comparison of lambs and humans and God shows how they should act and strive to become. Humans should be meek and mild like lambs because it is God who “is called by thy name/ for he calls himself a lamb.” (Blake 13-14).

The image I chose for this poem shows the face a lamb and a woman fused together. The tone of the poem is childlike. The questions he asks only to soon be answered through rhymes show this. And while it is a child who speaks this poem, it does not have to be one who is represented in this poem. Anyone of any age is a child of God, infant, toddler, teenager, adult, and elderly. Everyone is and will be a child of god.
While reading the poem, I subconsciously thought of the child as a boy because of the Blake’s use of masculine pronouns, like he, in referencing God. However, it is not only the males that can take part in following the Lamb of God and becoming one also. Males, females, and everyone in between are allowed to join the house of God and convert to Christianity. This image allows the reader and viewer to put a “face” to the poem.

The engraving that William Blake inscribed his poem “The Lamb” on shows a herd of sheep near what looks like a barn and a river. There’s a child with them, and his hand is stretched out towards one of the lambs.  I think his engraving very literally interprets the poem that Blake wrote. In the poem, the child is speaking. Without the engraving, it’s hard to tell who the child is actually speaking to – it could be a lamb, but it could also be a metaphor for something or someone else. However in the picture we can clearly see that the child is actually speaking to a lamb. He has his hand stretched out, and the lamb is looking up at him intently as the child asks “who made thee?”, who “gave thee life and bid thee feed by the stream and o’er the mead?” The child then goes on to a more theological explanation, where he explains to the lamb who “made” him, saying “he is called by thy name, for he calls himself a lamb…I a child and thou a lamb. We are called by his name.” The “lamb” is a name that is often times used to describe Jesus in the Bible, the ‘lamb of God.’ Here, the child references many of what he considers to be Jesus’s creations – the meadow, the stream, the lamb itself. He’s explaining to the lamb who was behind all these wonderful creations. I think the engraving the author did really compliments the poem because it captures the innocence and meekness of the young child and the lamb, and represents the beauty of creation Blake talked about.

The Chimney Sweeper is featured as a part of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence”, which corresponds with a child’s perspective on grim living conditions and adversity. The Chimney Sweeper tells of the young narrator who is essentially forced to work as a chimney sweeper. He and his companion, Tom Dacre, witness the children who work alongside him “locked up in coffins of black” – symbolizing their inability to escape from the harsh lifestyle. Coffins are a symbol of death, which is possibly a metaphor for both salvation and their loss of innocence after having been subjected to years of working.

A stark contrast is made in the third stanza, in which Tom Dacre dreams of an Angel that sets the children free. The children then run off into the field, laughing and with the sun shining upon them. However, the Angel tends to be just a manifestation of the hopes of being liberated from the confinement. He desperately clings on to dreams of meeting an angel that will save him. However, he knows that it is futile – he is, in the end, still a chimney sweeper and the only salvation hinted in the poem is death.

The engraving by William Blake of The Chimney Sweeper is very vibrant with hues of green and blue (which are colors that correspond with nature). Unlike the poem which offers a more direct hint of apprehension through words, the image is hauntingly cheerful. Children are shown linking hands and putting their arms up in the air – usually a sign of celebration (or of captivity, although I don’t believe it applies here). The engraving is subtly ominous because it shows what I depict to be an angel, clothed in a robe with a pink hue. The pink is rather deceptive, as it seems the angel is lowering a child onto a coffin. What I feel is largely different from the engraving and the poem is that the poem offers background insight with a child’s perspective. On the other hand, the engraving features a group of children, which tends to be more detached.

                                                              The Chimney Sweeper

The photo below shows, a couple of young boys who seem to have been suffering. I say this because they all look untamed, and very sad. When children look like this often it shows a sign of neglect from parents. “That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.” The children in the picture may not be locked up in coffins literally, however they are metaphorically. I say this because it seems as if the children are not living for themselves, but instead for the benefits of others. The children in the photo below do not seems happy as many children would usually seem in their photos.

The child speaks of how his father sold him to an employer to work most likely in a factory, although he doesn’t say that exact. Context clues will tell one that that is what he meant when he said: “So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.” He names a few more young boys who are also sweepers Tom, Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack. Tom goes to sleep and dreams that an angel sets free all the sweeps, and they would enjoy the rest of their childhood. The angel tells Tom that if he is a good boy God will love him and he will never want joy. I believe that the dream helped lighten the days of the sweepers listed above, because they believed that they were no longer alone.