Notes to Aid Analysis of The Chimney Sweeper"
“The Chimney Sweeper” Soapstones
Speaker: a small child; in the second later poem, the speaker probably is an older child
Occasion: (what’s going on) exploitation of the children; children are revealing the exploitation they are experiencing;
Audience: who are they speaking to? To society; to a passerby; to you
The second one might be speaking to the Church
Purpose: To enlighten people about the atrocious conditions of the chimney sweepers
Subject: The exploitation of the innocent
These, combined with diction and imagery and metaphor, form tone.
Exploitation of the children by whom? By society, by parents, by the church
Imagery, Diction, Metaphor (Poetic techniques)
The choice of diction: ‘weep – which is the unaspirated word “sweep” (Blake makes his point that the child is so small he has a lisp and cannot pronounce the “s” in sweep. The fact that this is uncommented on renders the effect even more devastating).
Metaphor and imagery: the clothes of death, black coffin, soot, white snow, Angel, laughing, running, sun, the water, clouds, heaven
Soot: black dust from left over fire
Juxtaposition: to place next to each other for effect or to show differences or similarities.
Who is speaking?
To whom is he speaking?
What happened to his mother and father when he was quite young?
What effect does the word “weep” have on the hearer? Does it move him/her to pity?
Is the child trying to say “sweep”? Why does he say “weep” instead? Does this reveal the extreme youth and vulnerability of the child?
Why does Blake use the phrase “So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.” What effect does the use of the pronoun “you” have on the observer? Does it make it more immediate? More personal? Does it somehow implicate you the listener as a participant in the child’s exploitation?
The introduction of another child, Tom Dacre, who cried when his hair, a symbol of beauty and youth, was cut - which again suggests cruelty and exploitation of a child.
The cutting of the hair is an act of cruelty inflicted upon the child by another for his, the aggressor’s, own benefit.
Hair: youth, beauty,
Cut: violent, hard, Anglo-Saxon word connotating an act of violence done upon the child
Lambs back: the lamb was the animal symbolic of Christ which represents his innocence and purity.
The child tells Tom that now that his hair is cut the soot cannot ruin his hair which puts a happy lie to the truth that his hair has been cut so that he may work more efficiently for the benefit of another. The innocent frequently find comforting thoughts to believe in to make the pain more bearable.
And so he was quiet.
Because he is obedient (quiet) he is visited with a dream, a respite from his waking nightmare, in which he is not alone; the dream state is populated with thousands of little boys, all of them abused, locked up in coffins of black – which continue the motif of the narrow, claustrophobic chimney the children are forced to work in during the day. Their names are common names, monosyllabic, given to little boys unluckily born to the poor, the easily disposed of.
But the little narrator eagerly recounts that in this dream an Angel comes by with a bright key to unlock the coffins – the Angel, beatific and carrying the bright key, is in sharp counterpoint to the darkness and constriction of the coffin and he frees the little boys, the Jacks, and the Neds and the Joes, the unlucky children of the poor, from the misery of their lives. The children, now free from the blackness, are leaping, are laughing, are running to the river to purify themselves, to cleanse themselves of the soot in the warmth of the sun. This dream, now filled with images of warmth (the sun), of color (the green plain) and of purity ("and wash in a river") is a small gift of respite from the cold, the stark – the black, the white, the gray, the absence of color – and of course, the filth, the soot.
The dream continues and the children are now lifted to heaven, clean and naked, restored to their original innocence, absent of possession or clothes, and are told that if they are good - obedient – they will have God for their father. For their obedience to the unfair, crushing work and poverty that fate has condemned them to, they will eventually be rewarded in the after life.
But with the return of the cold, gray, icy morning, the dream – the Angel, the sun, the warmth, the cleansing purifying water - fades. The boys rise in the darkness, and taking the bags, which in the dream they left behind, they return to their soul destroying jobs of toiling in the coffin-like chimneys. The small narrator happily – and heartbreakingly – recounts the lie he has been told so often by his exploiters - that if he is good he will come to no harm. The innocent belief in a crushing lie that the bystander, the reader, knows is a lie adds to the pathos of the “Chimney Sweeper”.
The second poem is spoken by a boy, perhaps the same boy, but older, wiser, more knowing of the lies told by the Church to him and others of the dispossessed to keep them quiet. “A little black thing among the snow” continues the motif of a colorless nightmare. The child, once pure with white hair, has been reduced to a little black thing, devoid of humanity. It is crying, “Weep, Weep” – again so young that the word sweep has been aspirated to ‘weep, ‘weep – “in notes of woes”, in music of despair.
An unknown passerby asks "where is thy father and mother?" And the child, this little black thing, answers that they have gone to the church to pray. This child speaks with understanding and bitterness of his brief moment of a happy, carefree childhood, but because he was young and of sweet disposition ("and smiled upon the winter’s snow") his parents clothed him in "clothes of death and taught him to sing the notes of woe". The imagery this child presents is not brightened with imagery of angels, or the warmth of the sun or the purification of water, but is darkened with the brutal juxtaposition of this little black thing huddled against the cold, austere whiteness. There is no laughter, nor any other sounds of happiness for the little black thing, now devoid of personhood, has been taught the song of woe by his father and his mother.
But his parents are ignorant and are victims of the lies told to them (“they think they have done me no injury") by their king, their “social betters” and by their church, and believing these lies, they inflict suffering on their child. And so the parents, with a clear conscience - because they have been told they have done right by their king, their church and their god - go to church to pray. The poor are told the innocent will be rewarded for their obedience in heaven in the afterlife, but their obedience has turned earth into a hell for the innocent, for which their children must pay.
Comments