After reading The Chimney Sweeper from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence”, I was able to note many similarities between the image presented below and the poem itself. The speaker of the poem is a young boy who was sold by his father to become a chimneysweeper after his mother passed away. Within the poem, the boy explains his painful life of sweeping chimneys and sleeping in soot.

One way in which the poem and image work together is that the image directly portrays a young boy who is a chimney sweep. The pain and sorrow on his face portray him as someone who is struggling with his life, similar to the speaker of the poem and little Tom Dacre. Tom is a character in the poem who dreams of being set free from his life as a sweeper. In his dream, him and other chimney sweeps are locked up in coffins and an angel comes along to set them free. This moment of the poem enables readers to feel some of the pain that these young boys are going through. The coffin in his dream acts as a symbol of the confinement they face in their lives as chimney sweeps.

The boy in the image appears dirty and tired, just as we imagine Tom and the other chimney sweeps from the poem to be. The image helps me to understand just how miserable life for these young boys was. At the end of the poem, after Tom awakens from his dream, we see a moment of happiness from him. The speaker says that Tom is happy as he goes off to work. This image of course differs from that part of the poem, as it only shows the depressed side of life as a chimney sweep.