WILLIAM BLAKE
THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER (1789)
When
my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
There's
little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd llke a lamb's back. was shav'd: so I said
"Hush. Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
And
so he was quiet & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack.
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.
And
by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river. and shine in the Sun.
Then
naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
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.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
In this paper I am going to talk about the
poem “ The Chimney Sweeper” of William Blake.
The poem is about children. It appears that
Blake wants to show us the way of thinking of the children of that time, how
was the world for them. When you are a child, you only see the good things of
the world around you and you are taught by your parents what to do and what not
to do. If we analyse the poem we realise that what Blake
wants to reflect in it is the world of
children. A world in which all the things are full of love and beauty and a
world in which you have to do what you’ve been told to do by your parents.
It’s a world of fantasy and imagination, a world of innocence.
In the poem, Tom has a nightmare but then, the
arrival of an Angel solves the problem. I think that what Blake wants to show us
is that children live completely inside the world of innocence.
Later, in the poem the Angel says Tom that if
he is a good boy, he’d have God. And this is another point that it is
imposed to children in this world of Innocence. Children are thought that God
is present every day, parents impose them a reality in which they are watched
and protected by God and they have to obey him.
In the first stanza, Blake has introduced us
to the working conditions that children had at that time. “Blake abhorred
slavery” [WIKI01] and he give us an example
of what kind of jobs had children (chimney sweepers). Then, he makes an irony:
he writes “weep weep weep weep” instead of writing “sweep
sweep sweep sweep”.
In the second stanza, Blake makes a comparison
“that curl’d like a lambs back”, he compares it with a lamb
because lambs are meek, lambs are inside the world of Innocence. And another
thing that attract attention is when he says “the soot cannot spoil your
white hair”, a white hair generated by the job the children does. I think
he is attacking this injustice.
The third stanza is about the typical theme of
the world of children; children have dreams and imaginations.
But then, in the fourth stanza, an Angel comes
and liberates them from danger. In this stanza is where Blake makes more
ironies: children are catched by the world of Innocence, there is always a
figure “God” that protects them and there is always a world of
happiness and good things.
In the fifth stanza is when Blake introduces
the topic of the teachings of the Bible and I think that he is criticizing that
people believe all the things that the Bible says. Adult people are very
religious and they do the things they are taught by the church. “One of
Blake’s strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that he felt it
encouraged the suppression of natural desire and discouraged earthly joy” [WIKI01]. What Blake
means is that people don’t follow their desires because it disobeys the
orders of the Bible. Desire is seen as sin and an example of sin is sex.
“Blake’s views on what he saw as
oppression and restriction of rightful freedom extended to the church. In his
spirituals beliefs he shows his own distinction between the Old Testament God,
whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God (Jesus Christ in
Trinitarianism), whom he saw as a positive influence.” [WIKI01]
The last stanza is about the same topic, that
if you have obeyed God, you don’t have to fear harm.
Now, we’ve seen that the main
But to fully understand “the Chimney
Sweeper” of “Songs of
Innocence”, we have to put it in the context of the other works of Blake.
We are going to compare it with “the
Chimney Sweeper” of
“Songs of Experience” (1794).
We need to move from the world of Innocence to
the world of Experience. It is the contrary to the world of Innocence; the
subjects of these poems are not children, they’ve grown up. Another
distinction is that this people don’t have the same mentality, they
don’t see (as in the world of Innocence) that all the things are good and
beautiful.
In “the Chimney Sweeper” (1794),
we see that the child censure his parents, God, the King and his Priest for his
misery. We notice the presence of a more experienced person that doesn’t
see the world as the people in the world of Innocence, he sees the fear, the
problems of the people…
In this poem, Blake is criticizing the Church
too, maybe to make people conscious of the big problems that people had at that
time.
And now we are going to compare “the
Chimney Sweeper” with another poem of “Songs of Experience”
called “London” (1794).
Another time we see that the subject of the
poem has changed and now he has grown up. We don’t see more the world of
Innocence, instead of it we see in the subjects fear, envy … Things have
changed completely and we find sentences like “cry of fear”,
“
The poet and painter William Blake is the most
extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and
intellectual movement that originated in
Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination,
and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of
irrationalism. Recurring themes found in Romantic literature are the criticism
of the past, emphasis on women and children, and respect for nature. And as we
have seen in the poems, they reflect this
society and this moment. William Blake poems are about the problems that
were happening in that time, Blake’s time. For this reason, in his poems
he shows us the anger towards his society. Anger because neither the state or
the church did anything to help the people and the children that were dying for
example as chimney sweepers.
If we put the poem in relation with today, we
see that the work conditions have changed a lot in some countries, (for example
we don´t have this problem in our country) but there are places where
unfortunately children of even 7 years old are working in tedious jobs and
can’t receive an education and sometimes the can’t even eat.
But I think that today there is still a world
of Innocence and a world of Experience. When you are a child you live protected
by older figures around you in your daily life. You only see the good things of
the world and you stay out of the problems. You accept what your parents have
taught to you, and you are taught that desire or passion are a sin and in this
manner, what we are doing is creating repressive institutions.
Then, when you get older, is when you pass to
the world of Experience and you realize that the world of innocence is only an
illusion.
Bibliografia
[WIKI01] “Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. William Blake [en línea]. Dirección URL: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake> [Consulta: 24 noviembre 2007]”
“ Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. The Chimney Sweeper, [en línea]. Dirección URL: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chimney_Sweeper> [Consulta: 24 noviembre 2007]”
“ Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Romanticism, [en línea]. Dirección URL: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticismr> [Consulta: 24 noviembre 2007]”
“ Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia.