"The Chimney Sweeper"

Paper Summary:

The paper illustrates how William Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper" uses the familiar tone of nursery rhyme and deploys children's vocabulary and sing-song diction to convey the horrible, limited circumstances of the child speaker's life. The paper explains that the innocence, purity, hopes and light of childhood and heaven are contrasted with the darkness of the soot and the physical, manual labor of chimney sweeping.

From the Paper:

"The speaker of the poem "The Chimney Sweeper" from "Songs of Innocence" is a boy, sold like a slave by his father to be an apprentice chimney-sweep after his mother died when he was so young he could hardly say: "'weep!'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" In other words the little boy could hardly speak the name of the occupation he was supposed to fill. Also the use of the term weeping signifies weeping for his mother. He could hardly apprehend the loss of one of his parents, the cruelty of his other parent in apprenticing him as a sweep, and also the misery of the life before him."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Blake, William. "The Chimney Sweeper." Songs of Innocence. 1789. 28 Sept 2007.http://www.online-literature.com/blake/628/
• Blake, William. "The Chimney Sweeper." Songs of Experience. 1794. 28 Sept 2007. http://165.29.91.7/classes/humanities/britlit/97-98/blake/POEMS.htm

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