The Chimney Sweeper (Innocence)

This time I’ll be analysing a pair of poems, both in Innocence and Experience respectively. They are both named The Chimney Sweeper, but diverge significantly because they are set in the two different Contraries. While I’ll be analysing them separately, I hope I’ll be able to clearly distinguish the links they share.

The Chimney Sweeper (Innocence)

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.

Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curl’d like a lambs 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 & 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.

Context

There’s quite a bit of context to this poem to get through. When this poem was written, child chimney-sweeping was still legal, and was not made illegal until after Blake’s death in 1875. But while it was legal, boys as young as 4-7 were effectively sold into slavery , and would grow into to deformed, wizened old men because of the poor conditions of their profession. They developed ailments like sooty warts, stunted growth and cancer of the testicles. There was also a campaign underway to legislate minimum conditions for climbing boys; they couldn’t enter the profession until they were eight, they would need to be washed once a week and they couldn’t be forced with fires, but this only succeeded outside of Blake’s lifetime.

Form and Structure

The poem consists of six quatrains, each formed of rhyming couplets. While the first stanza is written in trochaic metre, after that it alternates between anapaestic and iambic feet, which is typically found in light-hearted verse; this reflects the relentless optimism of the speaker.

The form is a monologue, which isn’t usual for a Song of Innocence, but this is so that Blake writes with a child’s innocent perspective as a contemporary social indictment.

Stanza One

The first stanza acts as the preliminary to the speaker’s story, as if they’ve been brought to us by Blake to provide the narrative, and to receive our pity.

The repetition of “weep weep weep weep” encapsulates the childish tone of the speaker, while contextually, the sweeps would be encouraged by their masters to cry the streets for advertisement.

Stanza Two

The reader is then introduced to Tom Dacre, perhaps named after the Lady Dacre almshouse on James Street, a fellow sweeper, who embodies innocence. This is highlighted when Tom’s hair is compared to being “curl’d like a lambs back”, as the lamb connotes innocence.

Stanza Three

Tom dreams of his fellow sweeps being “lock’d up in coffins of black”, the meaning of which has many interpretations. Some critics literally interpret the “coffins of black” to be airless shafts the sweepers worked in. Other believe this to metaphorically represent the living death state of their life-denying circumstances. Critic Southey notes the following:

“The blackened and sooty body of the young child becomes an emblem of the body itself, the coffin carried with us everywhere.”

Here Southey explains that in Blake’s visionary imagination, the plight of the chimney sweep becomes the plight of all humankind trapped in their mortal bodies, longing to be free.

Stanza Four

Following this rather macabre vision, Tom goes on to dream of an idyllic paradise after the sweeps have been freed from their mortality where “Then down a green plain” the boys are “leaping” and “laughing”. The alliteration of the latter demonstrates how contrived this imagery is. But it is through Tom’s active imagination of a pastoral afterlife that he can cope with the horrific circumstances he finds himself in. This stanza serves as a celebration of the imagination over reason.

Stanza Five

The sweeps are able to leave their “bags” behind, which once again can be interpreted literally as the bags of soot sweeps would sleep on, or their mortal bodies as they leave for the afterlife.

Because Tom can “have God”, he will “never want joy”, by which Blake means that he will never lack or desire joy because God’s love is the key for us all. This line focuses on the quote from Karl Marx:

“Religion is the opium of the masses.”

Marx believed that a blind-faith in religion was a means of escape for people like Tom Dacre who found themselves in disadvantaged circumstances. However, Blake is criticising organised religion for promising an afterlife as an incentive for acquiescing to circumstances that the Church condoned for their own benefit.

Stanza Six

The final line of this stanza ends, “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.” This is the ultimate example of ignorant innocence, in that Tom has been deluded into a false sense of duty in return for the promise of an afterlife following his inevitable untimely death. Critic Freedman suggests that:

“The sin of organised religion, as Blake sees it, is to prevent people from seeing things as they are by training them in the fallacy of received wisdom.”

Tom is susceptible to this “fallacy” because he only dwells in Innocence, and does not have the Experience to acknowledge that this wisdom is false.

I will be including a post on the Experience antitype to this poem, but I hope these notes are useful!