Hey everyone! Let me first start off this blog post by saying that I absolutely LOVED William Blake’s poems from “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”. From this epic collective of poems, the two that caught my eye the most were the poems entitled, “The Chimney-Sweeper”. While reading these poems I noticed three main themes that both poems share. The themes are death, class division (class consciousness), and religion (aka God). The theme that I want to mainly focus on in this post is the theme of religion.
In the first “The Chimney-Sweeper” poem, Tom Dacre has a dream about his fellow chimneysweepers being freed and joining God in heaven. I found this part very interesting because the poem describes the children chimneysweepers in the dream as “locked up in coffins of black”. In my mind, I took this as an inner meaning portraying the life of a chimneysweeper as a life that you can only be freed from by death. I came to this sad conclusion because of clues left by Blake throughout the poem. In the beginning, Tom Dacre is crying because he had to shave his head to make it easier to clean himself. As a chimneysweeper, soot gets everywhere, and since it was expensive to bath during this time period, Tom got his hair shaved off. Blake describes Tom’s hair as “curled like a lamb’s back”. To me, I took this as an inner symbolism for Tom being a sacrificial lamb because chimneysweepers lived very short lives and were worked to death as a sacrifice to the upper class. Later in the poem when Tom is dreaming, he sees his fellow chimneysweepers “Wash in a river, and shine in the sun. Then naked and white, all their bags left behind”. This part of the poem got to me because all Tom really wants to do is bath and play around like a normal child which he cannot do because of his status as a chimneysweeper. Also during the dream in the poem, I found it strange the way Blake wrote the line, “He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.” I don’t really know what to make of this line, but I feel like he meant to say “He’d have God for his father, and never want for joy.” If the line had the word for added to it, it would make sense that God is saving him from his miserable life.
In the second poem, which for me was even sadder and harder to read, the child chimneysweeper is crying in the snow. His parents are assumed to be (if they are not dead) in the church praying. The theme of religion is carried through with the parents, and with the last two lines of the poem that are complexly worded. Blake writes:
“And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.”
These two lines are interesting because they can be taken two ways. Either that God, priest, and king create a heaven built upon the misery of people or they literally make up heaven to make us think there is a better place for us so we are content with our misery. Whichever way Blake wanted us to take in this line, it is still a sad sentiment connected with class division during this time period. Overall, I found both these poems to be very insightful into the lives of child laborers who sadly continue to exist worldwide, and lured me into reading more poems by William Blake.
Anson
I must say that I really had a delightful and perceptive time while reading Blake’s Poems from “Songs of Innocence And of Experience”. From this collection of poems, one poem that wobble my state of emotion is “The Chimney Sweeper” from the “Song of Innocence”. I’m fond of the way Anson interpreted his thought in this blog post. It amuses me how William Blake wrote this poem about the sad life of those child laborer in 1794, and this sad situation remained same in this twenty first century throughout the whole world, especially in the third world countries. I believe that in the poem, Blake Crate, the character Tom Dacre who is the ultimate symbol of the social injustice we are living with. It makes me sad and angry at the same time when Tom’s childhood and his innocence was forcefully snatched from him just because he was born into poverty. As Blake states in the poem “And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins & set them all free.” Perhaps, it means that the life of a Chimney sweeper can get his desire destination only by the death, which is sad and cruel in any means.
I want to agree with Anson’s writing about suffering of the chimney sweeper’s soul. Here we see how William Black presents the pain and sorrow of the low class people. The theme of social inequality is one of the main themes in Black’s poems. It is very brightly presented in his poem “LONDON”. But he did not want to show the industrial life of the growing city with the dirty Thames River and poverty of people, he wanted to share his own pain and suffering for all the “charted” people are “marks of weakness, marked of woe”. He is saying: “In every voice, In every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear,” mining he hears that people as he is one of them.
This poem is song against the high class people, authority and power of upper class above the average class people, because the upper class dictates the law and rules in the London’s daily life. Black is suffering for the “hapless solders” that have to fight by the order of the palace and their unreasonable death. Even the institute of marriage is unstable in this world and suffering from prostitution.
Reading Black’s poems I thought how is today’s world different from the world of his age? Does something changed today? And my answer is pretty simple…Nothing changed…the same social inequality and dictatorship of the authority. Of cause, we do not have child labor today how it was in London several centuries ago, but the relationship people are still the same and the big and industrial city always was and will be a “suffering soul” with its strict laws and rules of survival. And the same theme of “locked” freedom….
Anna Kapitsa
I agree with Anson that the second poem is even sadder than the first. The main reason for that is because in the Songs of Innocence, Tom is able to dream of a brighter life, even if it is not a real life. Tom’s hardships and misery, no matter how futile, are covered by the thought that he would “have God as his parent & never want joy.” In the Songs of Experience, however, the child experiences no such emotions. He merely puts on a mask to show that he is “happy, dance & sing.” Such a grim statement makes the reader realize that the child is no longer innocent, that he knows there are no better futures and bright dreams where God is his father, because here “God & Priest & King, make up the heaven of his misery.” In this second poem, the child is more mature, (assuming he is around the same age as Tom Dacre), and sees the world as it is, not what he wants it to be.
Svetlana Pak
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