The Chimney sweeper “ in The Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

 
      Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), in Blake’s time, as now, his most accessible poems, drew praise from some of his greatest contemporaries. Coleridge called him ‘a man of Genius’, exclaiming, in a letter of 6 February 1818, ‘verily I am in the very mire of commonplace common-sense compared with Mr. Blake, Apo- or rather anacalyptic Poet, and Painter!’ 1 Wordsworth, according to Crab Robinson’s ‘Reminiscences’ (1852), declared that ‘there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the Sanity of Lord Byron & Walter Scott!’ 2 But Blake’s poetry attracted little public  notice in his lifetime. His method of illuminated printing – engraving on copper plates, from which impressions were taken, then coloured and bound by Blake and his wife – made copies scarce and costly.

   William Blake was critical of institutions and relentless rules governing social performance and morality. He was also highly aware of censorship, the methods by which the government could silence the tongue of the poets .

Allegory was consequently  an urgent tool to his art. Without it he may not have articulated his deeper criticisms in such effective and strong  ways, and he has much to say both about his society and its moralistic religious principles. Allegory was the perfect means of expressing criticism without obviously attacking the bourgeois.

     I will focus  on “The Chimney sweeper “ in The Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake. This short and seemingly simple poem tell us much about Blake’s world, its social stratification and the institutions and structures within it.

Just as “The Chimney Sweeper” of Innocence looks to an inner spirituality  in his bleak and gloomy  situation, the sweep of Experience can only see his position bitterly and literally, regarding himself as being insignificant and devoid of boon, a “little black thing among the snow.” The implications that these complementary yet contrasting poems generate creates allegorical potential. One can see both poems as the psychological reflections of a single chimney sweeper as his mind constantly shifts between optimistic and pessimistic thoughts. However, the chimney sweep of Innocence possesses a multidimensional view of his predicament. The character is aware of his poverty-stricken situation: “my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry weep, weep, weep ... / So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.” Despite this awareness, he is maintained  by his own “bright” visions and has the energy to care for and encourage others such as Tom Dacre to nurture “happy and warm” thoughts to defense himself from the harsh climate outside. The Sweep’s attitude is one of human compassion and spirituality, dimensions that mark him as having attained a state of higher innocence, a state in which he is aware of more than the suffering of the human world. The Sweep of Innocence functions in an expansive, multidimensional, and therefore allegorical manner, an approach Blake encourages his readers to attain. This position of perceptive awareness has not been gained by the Sweep of Experience who lets his worldly woes crowd all the faculties of his mind. This Sweep is confined in a one-dimensional singularity of vision. Readers are made conscious of the limitations of their own attitudes in comparing these figures.
      From another perspective, Blake intends the reader to feel outrage for both Sweeps’ situations. They are representations of the hardship and cruelty of the late eighteenth-century workplace. These young children were forced into dangerous labour because their limbs are tiny enough to enable them to squeeze into chimney stacks. By the late 1780s and early 1790s, there was concern for the welfare of the“climbing boys,” . Laws were passed to forbid the boys “calling the streets” without supervision and only between the hours of five in the morning and midday, six days a week. However, this legislation scarcely  protected them. The boys worked in contamination and darkness, continually inhaling soot and smoke, being forced – sometimes by scorching – up narrow and twisted chimneys, unable to secure adequate rest and cleanliness. Their work subjected them to terrible scars, burns, scratches and diseases. Often beginning work at the age of five, by the time they were twelve or thirteen years of age, they would have grown too large for chimney sweeping, but their bodies would inevitably be broken, leaving them stunted and deformed . Blake’s “little black thing among the snow” is designed to prompt the reader’s conscience. The poems highlight the extent to which work could literally form the worker, mentally, physically and emotionally . The sweep is no longer a person, but likened to a piece of coal, a “little black thing” whom many would pass in the street without a care. Blake’s Sweeps are allegorical figures for the chronic working conditions of the poor. As Makdisi states, “Blake’s urban figures of whore and chimney sweeper offer particularly striking cases of the reduction of human beings to organs for work” . Blake uses his verse to expose darkness within the social systems of the late eighteenth century, forcing  his readers to see the wrongs within these systems. In this sense, his Sweeps are designed to illuminate readers’ attitudes while dusting out the chambers of their minds.

Blake uses his Sweeps deliberately to shock readers into acknowledging that many of the poems, despite their seemingly simple and childlike language and rhythms, deal with harsh, adult subjects. The design of the poems of Innocence and Experience again challenges and defies reader assumptions. Innocence is not a state of blissful ignorance. If anything it is exactly the opposite. Innocence requires an enquiring mind that is hugely aware of inequality and suffering but that can also transcend situations of pain and despair with thoughts of hope and an awareness of the presence of God. It is capable of perceiving multiple levels of reality. Perhaps in choosing children as his predominant subjects, Blake was aware of the perceptive minds of most infants as they become conscious of the world around them. He would be familiar with Jesus’ attitude to children in Matthew 18.2-4: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” It is the “humble” little child who is seen as “greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18.3-4).  Children are reminders to the reader to approach Blake’s work with the freshness of a child, free from conventional ways of knowing . Blake’s allegory is based upon the shifting and altering of readers’ attitudes and perspectives. An open, inquisitive mind is best for reading Blake’s verse and the understanding of his meaning. Therefore, we cannot condemn the Sweep of Experience, but we must try to see from his perspective in order to transcend it and illuminate our own. In choosing to present children in his Songs, Blake illustrates the rapidity with which they become tainted and corrupted by the doctrines and the existence to which they are born, as highlighted by “Infant See also Mark 10.14 for a further example of Jesus’ compassion towards children: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” Sorrow.”
While the Sweep of Innocence can still imagine what it feels like to be a carefree child playing in the river and feeling the sun warming his skin, the child of Experience is highly aware of his lost innocence. He can never forget his “misery” and the “injury” his parents have caused him by forcing him to work while they worship at church. His childhood has been replaced by bitterness. Through this Song, Blake reflects the devastating weight of social burden upon vulnerable children at increasingly early ages. Unless they become aware that it is possible to view their situation in different ways, most are reduced to passively bitter compliance with the lives they are forced to accept. This Song is a profoundly rich and dark expression of the processes of the society in which Blake lived, while also being a reflection upon the ways in which allegorical perception works to free minds from exploitation. Blake uses the allegorical paralleling of both Sweeps’ viewpoints to make his readers aware of the situations and perspectives of others. In so doing, he guides his readers to look at the world and its characters afresh, and, unlike the Sweep of Experience, not immediately to pre-judge and condemn.




The Chimney Sweep’s cry of “weep, weep, weep” may be a lisping cockney or
childlike rendition of his cry of business, “sweep, sweep, sweep.” Through the depiction of a small child weeping his wares, Blake gives a graphic impression of the commodification of human life in London, a city that doubled in size during the eighteenth century to become the largest metropolis in the world (Tambling 100). Everyone was in the business of trading, buying and selling in order to survive, and the Chimney Sweep poems are a graphic reflection of this. Bodies increasingly become objects with a market value.





Bibliography:
Primary Sources:
Blake,William, Songs of Innocence and of Experience , DjVu Editions E-books, Global Language Resources, Inc. , 2001 ,
Secondary sources:
Selden, Raman. A reader's Guide to contemporary Literary Theory, New York, Harvester wheat sheaf, 1989نظریه ادبی و نقد عملی ترجمه دکتر جلال سخنور ، سیما زمانی
The Holy Bible, St. Matthew 18.2-4 ; 18.2-4
Natarajan, Uttara , Critical History From First Responses to Northrop Frye The Romantic Poets A Guide to Criticism, USA, BLACKWELL PUBLISHING , 2007

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