I choose this picture because it tells me very directly about the Chimney Sweeper. A child walking alone on the street in the rain(or the ash?). The picture corresponds to the poem “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”. The boy doesn’t have parents and without a guardian but needs to sweep the chimney to survive. However, “That thousands of sweepers were all of them locked up in coffins of black”. His friends are dead because of the brutal work environment. But he still hopes that the angels would take them to heaven. Children in 8 to 10 ages should stay in school and protected from their parents and all society. Children suppose to be the future, but Chimney Sweeper can only choose to be a “tool”. I feel very sad about this poem because the brutal reality happened before.
Jiayang, Actually this image illustrates the “Chimney Sweeper” poem that appeared in Songs of Experience, and the one you cite is from Songs of Innocence. Still the theme is the same. In the poem you quote, the coffins appear in the dream. We don’t know whether the speakers friends are literally dead, but the imagery of the dream reminds us that the chimneys the boys sweep are themselves like dark coffins. In both poems, Blake also makes clear that the parents are responsible for their child’s suffering. In the first poem, the father has sold the child into this apprenticeship, and in the second, the parents are off at church, imagining that their child is happy, while really he is miserable.