THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER (EXPERINCE)

Question 1

What is the poem about?

Answer 1

• The narrator asks the chimney sweeper where his parents are.
• He explains why they have abandoned him to misery.

Question 2

What is the social context behind the poem?

Answer 2

• The poem is a social critic against the child labour practices, prominent in the late 17th and 18th centuary in Britain.
• Climbing boys would be sold to master sweeps by their parents (young as 4)
• They would be required to remove the soot from chimenys, and carry heavy bags of soot.
• They would often suffer from spinal deformaties and deveop testicular cancer.

Question 3

Describe the structure of the poem

Answer 3

• 3 quatrains
• Mix of iambs and anapestic rhythm (ironically childlike)
• Half rhymes (eerie effect)
• Rhyme scheme becomes less regular (breakdown of order/ pretence)
• AABB

Question 4

Symbolic interpretation of the poem.

Answer 4

1. Highlights the performative religiosity of the Church and other institutionalized religions which are complicit in social injustice.
2. Explores the loss of innocence in the face of growing consciousness towards oppression and exploitation.

Question 5

Language used in the poem

Answer 5

• Indefinite article (impersonal)
• Epizeuxis (lipsing version of the chimney sweepers call)
• Interrogatives
• Synechdoche (Father and Mother= The state)
• Pathetic fallacy (death, burial, indifference)
• Monchrome colour pallett (no brightness seen in the other poem - ignornace is a bliss)
• Metaphor (notes of woe)
• Irony (because the children are happy they are sent to work/ and because they feign happiness at at work they thought to be willing ppts)
• Metaphor final line- (fruits of the labour/ happiness from suffering/ suffering allows them to perfom virtue)

Question 6

Religious imagery

Answer 6

• “God, and his Preist and King” inverted holy trinity (The god that appears in the poem is the contruction of God in the minds of the experienced/perverted Godly image Nobodaddy)
• They are the overarching sign of trynnay
• “Preist and King”- Earthly positions of power that have become corrupted/ institutions that played a large role in British upper and middle class life.
• “God and his Preist and King”- used frequently as major rhetorical objects of revolt.