CC - IX: A critical appreciation of The Chimney sweeper poem

     The full title of the complete work to which the two "Chimney sweeper" poems belong is Songs of innocence and of Experience showing the Two Contrary states of the human soul (1793), and it amply bears out Blake's antithetical visions of nature and man. Whereas the first one projects a world of childhood innocence, simplicity and purity, a kind of 'lower paradise', the second one of irony, hatred and cynicism, a kind of earthly hell. For instance, in the first Nurse's song he tells how children play and are allowed to go on playing until the light fades and it is time to go to bed, whereas in the second one he speaks of how they are in the grip of fear and jealousy. Understandably, the first one builds up a fabric of imaginative illusion but the second one breaks up it and lays bare instead the ugly reality behind it. Same is the case with his present two poems.

            Blake's chief  Motive in both the poems is to expose the tyranny, oppression and injustice of the contemporary industrialized society of which countless child-labours or for that matter the have-nots as a whole are victims. In the first poem he bring seed home by a pattern of irony which is converted in the second which is overt.

            "Add my father sold me file yet my tongue

            Could scarcely cry 'weep! Weep! Weep! weep!

            -This is how the poet introduces the baby Chimney-sweep, the central voice in the first poem and it brings out their hapless predicament in a way which is candid and yet with a veiled irony. Poverty, utter poverty leads to their misery, utter misery due to dull drudgery (" in soot 9 sleep') and that in an age when he cannot pronounce "Sweep" anything but "weep" How deep is the pathos involved in their situation!

            Blake carries on that them of their helplessness in a serio-comic manner in the next stanza in which the speaker-sweeper consoles his fellow-sweep Tom Dacre by saying, "Hush! Tom! Never mind it , for when your head is bare | you know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair". The irony does not escape the notice of the readers that while they think to be in a paradisal pastoral, they are actually slaves to explanation.

            The appearance-reality contrast continues in the dream-vision of Tom in which he is soaked in a beatific light of all joy and freedom of the Greenwood times denied to them in reality. The Angel offers him the healing touch of heaven in his distress-"...if he'd be a good boy | He'd have God for his father and convinced and is led to accept his fate happily("happy and warm") -"so if all do their duty they need not fear harm". But is it the real reality behind their situation? Blake seeks to explore it in the next poem.

            "A little black thing among the snow, | Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe !" - so begins the "Chimney sweeper" poem from Songs of Experience, and it amply bears out the piteously wretched and ironic situation of the children : in white surroundings ('snows') they are 'black' - and what a black! Not human beings, but reduced to machine ("things"). Irony is piled on irony when it is found that while they are not entitled to proper humanitarian development, their parents search for spiritual salvation-"They are both gone up to the church to pray". Noticeable, Blake here adds religious tyranny to economic tyranny. These selfish, irresponsible, hypocritical guardians have deprived them of their rightful privilege of childhood gaiety and joy (" happy", " dance", "sing") and impose on them the soul - Killing labour leading to "death".

           In the last stanza Blake develops this idea by ascribing their repression to not only family guardian but also to the socio-politico-religious guardians-"And are gone to praise God and His priest and King | Who make up a Heaven of our misery. "And here his idea of childhood exploitation widens into adulthood exploitation for which the religions and administrative institutions (state mechanic machineries) are solely responsible. They make their god at the blood, tears and sweat of the toiling masses; they wallow in luxury and comfort while the letter crush in misery and misfortune-"As the caterpillar choses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so | the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys", as Blake brilliantly sums of the irony in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.