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Flashcards in The Chimney Sweeper Innocence Deck (28)
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1
Q

“When my mother died I was very young”

A

Life expectancy was low and there were thousands of poor motherless children to be cared for by society. Their ‘care’ — provided by the church or state — was abysmal and many died. This little boy survived long enough to work for a chimney sweep.

It is possible that his mother died giving birth, bearing in mind the high maternal death rates.

2
Q

“And my father sold me”

A

Children could be bought and sold. This was the fate of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist when he was sold by the workhouse to an undertaker (mortician).

A report to a parliamentary committee on the employment of child sweeps in 1817 noted that ‘the climbing boys’ as young as four were sold by their parents to master-sweeps, or recruited from workhouses

3
Q

“weep! weep! weep! weep!”

A

The repetition of “‘weep!” four times seems almost uncomfortable as opposed to conventional tricolon where it would only be repeated thrice

The pun intended through the use of word ‘weep’ three times in the third line of this stanza holds pathetic significance. Most chimney sweepers, like him, were so young that they could not pronounce sweep and lisped ‘weep’. Since that tender age the little boy is sweeping chimney and sleeping at night in the soot-smeared body, without washing off the soot (blackness).

As the average size of a London chimney was only seven inches square, to encourage the sweeps to climb more quickly, pins were ‘forced into their feet’ by the boy climbing behind; lighted straw was applied for the same purpose.

4
Q

“in soot I sleep”

A

In the 18th and 19th centuries, young boys swept chimneys, as they were small enough to climb up them.

Chimney sweepers sometimes slept under blankets used to collect soot; hence “in soot I sleep.” This was in the era before Child Protection legislation for bad employment of children.

Another interpretation is that ‘sleeps in soot’ is a reference to sin. The fact that he was sold and exploited is a critique of society’s system. This is of course an adult view unconsciously expressed by the child.

5
Q

“There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried”

A

Instead of ruminating on his own condition, the speaker takes the time to look out for a child younger than himself. He will bring comfort to this younger child (“little Tom Dacre”).

We can speculate that this is an idealised picture. However, it is known that abandoned children often care for each other, the eldest assuming an adult role in the absence of parents. Being able to play, being occasionally naughty and rebellious is a luxury for children properly cared for.

This is a very famous character in Blake’s many poems. Tom was called ‘Dacre’ because he belonged to Lady Dacre’s Almshouse, which was situated between St. James Street and Buckingham Road. The inmates of the Almshouse were foundling orphans, who were allowed to be adopted by the poor only. It may be a foster father who encased the boy Tom by selling him to a Master Sweeper. Tom wept when his head was shaved, just as the back of a lamb is shaved for wool. The narrator then told Tom not to weep and keep his peace. The narrator told Tom to be calm because lice will not breed in the pate without hair and there will be no risk for hair to catch fire.

6
Q

“curled like a lamb’s back”

A

simile

describes Tom’s beautiful blonde hair as well as likening the children to a lamb, a symbol of innocence.

7
Q

“shaved”

A

This would have been done for practical reasons. It is also a biblical allusion to Samson: suggesting loss of power

8
Q

“white hair”

A

Little Tom’s hair might not have been literally white. Perhaps his hair was described as “white” to contrast the soot, and can also be a symbol of innocence being shaved off.

White hair is also found in the elderly–Blake may be implying that child labour ages and wears down one’s body and brain. It could also be implying that as a result of this, the child Chimney Sweepers are closer to their deaths.

Blake’s readers would also recognise it as an allusion to the vision of the ‘Son of Man’ Daniel 7:9 which was associated with Jesus. He is reminding his readers either that a maltreated child still bears the image of God, or that there is something divinely human about the child.

9
Q

“Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack”

A

The use of monosyllabic names further exemplifies the innocence of these children (ie: Dick instead of Richard, Joe instead of Joseph). They are common names in their familiar diminutive versions, probably representing all children; rather like ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’.

He saw in his dream that many Chimney sweepers, who were named Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack, were dead and their bodies were lying in caged coffins, made of black-coloured wood.

10
Q

“locked up in coffins of black”

A

Chimney sweepers are metaphorically locked in a black box (the chimney), and perhaps the only thing worse — or better in terms of release from suffering — is to be locked in the black box of death: a coffin.

The claustrophobic confines of grimy chimneys may have seemed like living coffins to their young occupants, many of whom lost their lives through their job. It also refers to the idea that bodies are dead things. A platonic belief was that human bodies were more or less prisons for the soul.

However, Blake believed that it was mistaken to look for ‘release’ in the future. He felt that humans do not need freeing from their bodies, but from the perception that reality can only be experienced through the senses. (Compare The Garden of Love and To Tirzah.) Therefore, focussing the child only on the hope of release in the future gives him a false idea about his body, and so about his freedom to change his life.

11
Q

“set them free”

A

The angel, through death, is setting the boys free from their lives as sweeps, escaping from the ‘coffin’ of living death as sweeps. It was also a literal death sentence for many boys in England at the time; many died early from lung and scrotal cancer.

Many suffered ‘deformity of the spine, legs and arms’ or contracted testicular cancer

suggests a positive and optimistic view on death. Also suggests that they will find peace only after death.

The freed little sweepers of the chimney ran down a green ground, washed themselves in the water of a river and dried themselves in the sunlight to give out a clean shine. This was really a very delightful moment for these chimney sweepers, who got freed from the shackles of bondage labor, exploitation and child labor

With poor sanitation and no running water, washing in a river represented a thorough clean, as well as evoking a pastoral idyll. It would also remind Blake’s readers of the many biblical images of healing and of new life that are associated with rivers, for example:

The healing of Naaman the Syrian by washing in the River Jordan 2 Kings 5:1-14
Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan Matthew 3:13–17
The Christian symbolism of baptism as dying to the old way of life and rising to a new eternal life.
Blake may be using the associations negatively, showing how the feeding of such imagery to the child has encouraged his escapist dream.

12
Q

“bags left behind”

A

Their ‘bags’ could be synecdoche, representing the suffering and oppression of the children. Today, in modern speech, we sometimes refer to ‘baggage’ as verbal shorthand for the effect on human psyche of past negative experiences.

‘Easy prey to those whose occupation is to delude the ignorant and entrap the unwary’, a sweep might be shut up in a flue for six hours and expected to carry bags of soot weighing up to 30lbs

13
Q

“good boy”

A

Blake introduces the doctrine of Christian Resignation: the more one suffers in silence — that is, ‘be a good boy’ — the happier the reward in Heaven.

This is an interesting viewpoint. Here Blake doesn’t advocate social protest by the children; for him that is the role of adults, what he is doing here in publishing these poems. Today we would urge abused children to speak out.

14
Q

“do their duty”

A

This sad ending describes how the children, in their young naïveté, are happy to work, for they are looking forward to death, where they will be free.

An alternative interesting interpretation is that the ending describes how the children were easily manipulated through an irrational and unreasonable religious vision. They can achieve ecstasy but their earthly lives are still terrible.

Blake’s poem is categorised as a positive ‘Song of Innocence’, which no doubt he did for completeness. He needed to write this in order to highlight the evil. But it is difficult, as Blake well knew, to put a positive spin on such grievous exploitation.

Further, it could suggest that the the vision Tom had, gave him a sense of hope, and after his death it will be okay; he will get the freedom that he lacks in the present. The vision creates a “warmth” and happiness despite the morning being cold as it fills Tom with hope for what’s to come beyond death. “So if all do their duty they need not fear harm” Can imply that if they continue with their work of chimney sweeping, they will be let into heaven, and have the freedom and peace that Tom saw in his vision

The practice was not abolished until 1875, nearly 50 years after Blake’s death.

This liberation, though, comes at a price. The angel who releases the sweeps with ‘a bright key’ tells little Tom ‘if he’d be a good boy / He’d have God for his father and never want joy’. This stipulation is repeated in the poem’s last line: the boys ‘need not fear harm’ if ‘all do their duty’. Such a submission seems an unlikely prescription from a social critic like Blake. While it is true that the dream helps Tom endure his misery (he feels ‘happy and warm’ when he wakes up), it becomes clear that Blake is not advocating passive acceptance of earthly misery in order to gain the joys of the kingdom of heaven after death.

15
Q

“rise upon the clouds”

A

The image of clouds floating freely is Blake’s metaphor for the freedom from the material boundaries of the body and an important visual symbol.

16
Q

“green plain”

A

Where, in reality, their lives are restricted, death-infected (the image of the black coffins), in the dream, they are free, leaping, running, sporting in the wind. The dream takes place in a pastoral idyll – ‘a green plain’ – where there is colour, light, pleasure and laughter; the real world is monochrome, dark, subject to the pressures of city life, and a capitalist economy where the boys can only weep over their degradation.

17
Q

Structure and versification

A

The poem is made up of six stanzas of AABB rhyme

There is a natural caesura after the word ‘died’ which indicates a pause perhaps to accommodate the distress of the sweep. The enjambement from the second to third lines conveys a rush of emotion which is brought up short by the repetition, exclamation marks and emphatic monosyllables of ‘weep!’

After the first three lines the metre alternates between anapaestic and iambic feet, which is usually found in comic or light-hearted verse. This enhances the relentlessly positive tone adopted by the speaker, which contrasts with much of the content. It underlines the suggestion of an innocent speaker who does not appreciate the full implications of what he is saying, or of one who uses words and happy visions to blot out the painful reality of his life.

Through the ironic use of the child-like anapaestic rhythm (two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one) which exposes such overly-simplistic, inane sermonising, Blake attacks the established church for perpetuating these insidious myths which maintain the dispossessed in a state of what Marx would later call false consciousness. Marx argued: ‘To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about theexisting state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. Although starting from a very different philosophical position (Blake was hardly a materialist), Blake had come to an identical position half a century earlier.

18
Q

“bright key”

A

The idea of the angel releasing the children into paradise reverses the fate of Adam and Eve who were banished from Eden, which was then guarded by cherubim with a sword Genesis 3:23-24. It also echoes the vision of Jesus in heaven who holds the keys of life / death in Revelation 1:18

19
Q

Imagery and symbolism of the child

A

Underlying the poem, though the term is not used, is the fact that the speaker is a child. All Blake’s associations with the image of the child are therefore in the background of the poem and affect our understanding of it. The fact that the word is not used means we have to remind ourselves that it is a child speaking, even though society has forgotten this. To their society, and to themselves, they are sweepers, not children; this is the core of their plight.

20
Q

Themes

A

Blake’s attitude to Christian belief about the future life

The distortion of Christian belief that makes it a means of controlling people’s behaviour

Parental care and authority - In The Chimney Sweeper, the father betrays the child and abuses his authority by selling him into an apprenticeship. Whether from necessity or choice, he has colluded with the system of oppression

Attitudes to the body and the life of the senses - In The Chimney Sweeper, the child is encouraged to deny his body altogether.

21
Q

“black thing in the snow”

A

Soot is black; the child is, presumably covered in it, but he’s also “black” in another way. He seems marked for death—he wears the “clothes of death” (7)—and stands in stark contrast to the white snow. The whiteness of the snow is a symbol of nature, of naturalness, and it contrasts with the very unnatural life of the chimney sweeper.

Soot is black; the child is, presumably covered in it, but he’s also “black” in another way. He seems marked for death—he wears the “clothes of death” (7)—and stands in stark contrast to the white snow. The whiteness of the snow is a symbol of nature, of naturalness, and it contrasts with the very unnatural life of the chimney sweeper.

The colour palette here is distinctly monochrome with none of the brightness and green of Tom’s dream in the Innocence poem; the sweep is depersonalised, a thing.

22
Q

“gone to church to pray”

A

This line reveals to the reader how Blake feels about society’s treatment of England’s poor disadvantaged working class. It is evident that the government seem to be symbolised by the “father and mother” because they are responsible for the well-being of the poor. This line is saying that Blake believes that they are abandoning their responsibilities for what they believe more important such as church or upholding appearances. Blake is criticizing the British elite.

The symbolism continues later in the poem as well when Blake says “…praise God and his priest and king”

means they’ve left him here to freeze

23
Q

“notes of woe”

A

The chimney sweeper says his parents “taught” him the “notes of woe.” “Notes of woe” refers to the child’s crying, but it is also a metaphor for his miserable life.

Having forced their son into enslavement, teaching him to sing ‘the notes of woe’, the parents then head to church to praise ‘God and his priest and king’, who, the boy tells us, ‘make up a heaven of our misery’. Interestingly, in an earlier draft, Blake wrote that this grim trio ‘wrap themselves up in our misery’, suggesting that they take comfort from the misery of others. The final version is far more powerful; the speaker’s parents collude with Church and State, actively constructing a heaven out of the misery of others, or, as Nicholas Marsh argues, ‘they “make up” a heaven where, in fact, there is “misery”

24
Q

“I was happy”

A

This is where the speaker’s innocence shines through. The government, like a mother and father, is supposed to take care of you. Blake’s central theme of irony is portrayed here by the innocence of the young boys cleaning the chimney of rich folks, so that the poor get sicker and weaker, and the quality of life for the rich improves. He appears to be happy when he sings and dances, so society turns the other way and ignores the problem. This poem exposes how exploitative the government and religion in England was at the time in the fact that it made some people’s lives better, while other people suffered.

25
Q

“smiled among the winter snow”

A

He pretended to be happy and conceal his real misery. The motivation may have been his belief that no-one would care enough to improve his lot. The ‘winter snow’ is a metaphor for his terrible life.

The speaker, though, remains determinedly happy. His instincts, like any child in Romantic writing, are positively driven even though, unlike the boys in the Innocence poem, he understands his oppression. Indeed, his happiness seems to be the reason that his parents sell him into slavery:

26
Q

“clothes of death”

A

The imagery is typical of the Experience poems: it’s set in winter and whereas the sweeps in Tom’s dream are ‘naked’, free of the clothing which in Blake often symbolises social convention or restriction, the speaker here wears ‘the clothes of death’ and sings ‘the notes of woe’ (unlike the laughing in the dream).

Being a chimney sweeper in London during this time was very dangerous. There were no child labour laws and no laws to regulate working conditions. Because of this the children were sent into chimneys from dawn till dusk to clean out chimneys.

This caused them to be almost permanently covered in soot which is the “clothes of death” referred to in this line. The children would often fall to their deaths or develop fatal illnesses such as lung cancer from the soot they breathed in during the day.

27
Q

“praise God…heaven of our misery”

A

The sweeper notes again that his parents have gone to church to “praise God and his priest and king.” “God and his priest” symbolizes the church more generally; the “king” symbolizes the state or government.

oxymoron

The authorial intent here seems to be to mirror the hypocrisy seen in society. People clothe these children in the poem, they go to church, but they never ensure that the poor share their prosperity in earthly life. Instead they often told these juvenile chimney sweepers that their service and suffering in this life would grant them access to heaven. This was their “heaven” on earth.

The sweeper concludes by saying “God and his priest and king” make “heaven” out of the child’s misery. Heaven here need not be paradise up in the sky; it can just symbolize anything that the sweeper’s parents, the church, and the government do that exploits the child.

28
Q

Social injustice

A

Both Chimney-Sweeper poems show Blake to be a radical critic of the social injustices of his age. His indictment of desperate material conditions and those institutions which perpetuate them is passionate and powerful, but his greatest anger is reserved for the forces – the established Church, mercenary and uncaring parents – that restrict our vision and prevent us from understanding both our oppression and the infinite possibilities of true perception.