Weep for the Sweeps

Chimney sweepers in England in the 1700’s were exploited young children (often orphans) who were sent into scary dirty chimneys to do hard manual – eventually fatal – labor for very little pay.  In Williams Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, he describes the lives of chimney sweepers in two separate poems by the same name – “The Chimney Sweeper.”  Each poem comes from a different perspective, that of innocence and of experience.  Blake’s condemnation of society and religion is plain to see in the two poems.  Blake makes us take a hard look at the lives of these young children and the impacts of society and religion for these children.

“The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, shows how vulnerable young children were exploited by being forced to clean chimneys at a very young age.  In “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence, the children feel like it is their “lot in life” to do this hard work, but they have very real fears of death, as described by one of the children’s dream of thousands of black coffins filled with young children that are chimney sweepers. They try to take even the bad news of being covered in black soot, having to have their hair cut short and certain impending death in a positive spin, being comforted in the thought that after they died, they would be clean and be able to play and laugh.  The children can only depend on each other and the promise of a protective parent, in God, and happiness in the afterlife.   Their innocence blinds them to the fact that they are being exploited by the adults in their lives and that life doesn’t have to be the way it is.  They are matter of fact about their situation and never seem to put any blame on anyone for their situation.  “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Experience describes an astute young child who feels mistreated by his parents.  He is left to do the literal “dirty work” that will end up killing him, while his parents are off worshipping “God, and his Priest and King” (11).  Both writings show the child feeling abandoned. In the version in Songs of Innocence, the child seems happy to know that even though he is doing this hard, deadly work, he will be rewarded in the afterlife.  In the Songs of Experience version, the child seems much more critical and angry.  He is basically accusing his parents of child abandonment and abuse, noting that his parents dressed him in the “clothes of death” (7).  They don’t have a clue what is going on in the heart, mind and physical body of their very young child by their own abusive actions.  

In “Blake’s Two Chimney Sweepers,” Linda Freedman discusses the background and exploitation of chimney sweepers in London and compares Blake’s paired “The Chimney Sweeper” poems.  Freedman’s article brings up the interesting point that “weep” and “sweep” sound similar, being a play on language. This is something I had not thought of. The way “weep” is used, is not normal; “weep” is usually used as a way to describe someone in mourning.  That, in essence, is what Blake must have wanted us to take from that. I envision the Innocence child weeping at the beginning of the poem like a baby who has lost a toy and conversely the Experience child weeping like an adult who has suffered a tragic loss.  Freedman concludes that the child from Innocence doesn’t understand the world he lives in and makes life a much scarier place.  Freedman believes in the Experience version, the child realizes that he is being taken advantage of and understands the dynamics of the world he lives in, and that makes the world less scary because he can have a sense of control with that knowledge.  Freedman describes the artistry’s stark difference in each poem: in the Innocence poem, there is beautiful green foliage, with wispy, angelic children – in stark contrast with the Experience poem, that is drawn in dull, dead colors and the child is weighed down and looks at the reader “accusingly” (Freedman).  Freedman concludes that the problems Blake describes are not just of the plight of the chimney sweepers, but of society and religion in general.  Another concept that Freedman brings up is the way that the children from the Innocence poem take the abusive language and use it as their own.  Young innocent children are known for copying and emulating the influential adults in their lives… it is how they learn.  I hadn’t thought of the way that the child in the Experience poem was looking at us, the readers.  He is looking right through to our very soul with his steely dark eyes, holding us as responsible as his own parents and the church.  The two children portray classic symptoms of coping strategies to survive abusive situations.  The child from Innocence rationalizes his situation in his mind that he basically just needed to do his work and that is the way things are, he might as well be happy.  The child from Experience uses a more mature defense mechanism of being assertive and speaking up for himself.  When asked, “Where are thy father and mother?” (3), the child went into great detail about where his parents were, what they did to him and how he feels about it.

            Robert Pinsky talks about the uneasy feelings he gets from William Blake’s twin poems “The Chimney Sweeper” in the Songs of Innocence and Experience.  In his article “A Perfect Discomfit,” Pinsky discusses how Blake makes us as readers look at everything in the world differently than how we did before.  Pinsky claims that the poems are both “unsettling art” because Blake makes us look at society; the victims – and the benefits that the people on the high end of the social status receive at their expense. Blake makes us become personally invested and responsible as the readers of his poem.  We feel guilty looking in on this heartbreaking situation.  Pinsky delves into the relationship between the two poems.  The Innocence version, he says is a stronger example, showing the cruelty in the children’s acceptance of their horrible fate to do “crippling, fatal labor” (Pinsky).  The Experience poem, on the other hand, Pinsky assesses that the child is critically condemning.  Pinsky’s first inclination is to think that the Innocence poem is a better poem that makes him feel more emotion and depth. The two poems are forever intertwined with each other.  Although the Experience poem is straight to the point and direct about the abuse the child suffers, the Innocence version affected me more deeply and ultimately gave me insight into how the children fear their impending doom. The death dream in the Innocence poem is vivid with images of death and salvation.  What works well is the pairing of the two poems.  The Innocence poem (which I read first) impacted how I envisioned the same fears affecting the child in the Experience poem, even though he didn’t expressly talk about his own fear.  I don’t think the Experience version of the poem would have had as much of an impact on my feelings of sadness and despair if I hadn’t read the Innocence version going into detail about Tom Dacre’s dramatic death dream.

            “The Chimney Sweeper” from The Songs of Innocence seems to convey the exploitation and abuse of children used as chimney sweeps in a much more dramatic sense.  The innocence of the children shows what a sad state their life is that they are willing to tolerate abuse by adults in their lives.  They don’t question why they are being forced to do this scary and deadly work.  They just know they are supposed to do it and can be happy about the fact that they will be rewarded in the afterlife by the promise of happiness and having “God for his father” (20).  The child doesn’t seem sad or upset at all that his father sold him.  The children are forced to be their own support system, comforting each other.  The child comforts Tom Dacre when his hair has to be cut and they comfort each other after the vivid dream of death. This is so sad, because the children are vulnerable and innocent.  They haven’t had the experience to even know that they are being done wrong. That should speak to us all about the injustices we are willing to live with as a society. 

            “The Chimney Sweeper” poems are art that forces us to take a look at society and how we can easily take advantage of vulnerable members of our society.  We like to believe that we as people and as society as a whole are good and just; but, humans have shown to be capable of treating other humans in horrible and abusive ways that are often normalized by society.  Blake infuses his poetry with visual art to condemn the reader and society for letting these atrocities happen, all the while “enjoying” his art.

Works Cited

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Sides of the Human Soul. William Blake, 1794.

Freedman, Linda. "Blake's Two Chimney Sweepers." British Library, British Library Board, www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/blakes-two-chimney-sweepers. Accessed 5 Nov. 2016.

Pinsky, Robert. "A Perfect Discomfit." Slate, The Slate Group LLC, 14 Sept. 2010, www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2010/09/a_perfect_discomfit.html.