The Chimney Sweeper

“The Chimney Sweeper” first appeared in Blake’s 1789 collection of poems Songs of Innocence, containing 19 short poems accompanied by Blake’s own engraved illustrations. Most of the poems are about children, emphasizing their guileless joy in life, even in the face of hardship. Blake uses the conventions of traditional children’s poetry to criticize contemporary approaches to educating children, especially those orphaned or abandoned, left to the care of their masters or public charities. The primary objective of such education was to promote industriousness and acquiescence to authority. The last line of the poem exemplifies that goal: “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm” (Line 24). The speaker has learned the lesson his guardians want him to learn: Do what you are told or else! In another poem, “Holy Thursday,” Blake mocks these “wise guardians of the poor” (William Blake, “Holy Thursday,” Line 11), who deftly create the public appearance of children’s welfare while enforcing rigid order and uniform thinking designed to keep the children obedient.

Blake’s real purpose becomes clear in the two-part collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), which combines “Songs of Innocence” with 26 other poems, called “Songs of Experience.” This collection’s subtitle—“shewing the two contrary states of the human soul”—indicates that the poems in the two sections complement each other and should be read as such. Songs of Experience contains counterparts with identical titles to several poems from Songs of Innocence. Other pairs of poems have different titles, but clearly counterpose each other on a symbolic level: “The Lamb” (Innocence) and “The Tyger” (Experience) or “The Divine Image” (Innocence) and “The Human Abstract” (Experience). Some poems in Songs of Experience have no counterpart in Songs of Innocence, but convey the same tension between opposite ideals.

We can understand “The Chimney Sweeper” in Innocence better when we know “The Chimney Sweeper” in Experience. Here is the latter poem in its entirety:

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying "’weep! ’weep!" in notes of woe!

"Where are thy father and mother? say?"

"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smil'd among the winter's snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,

Who make up a heaven of our misery."

Unlike the speaker in the earlier poem, this chimney sweeper has developed an awareness of his own victimization and is able to raise his voice in accusation and potentially rebellion. As he says in the third stanza, he still experiences natural joy in life, but that does not mean that he—and many children like him—are not being neglected by the parents and exploited by both religious (“Priest”) and social (“King”) institutions (Line 11).

It is now evident that the earlier “The Chimney Sweeper” is only partially about religious solace to exploited and unhappy children. It is also about how religious ideas and institutions can be tools of social control. As long as the young boy believes that his enforced hard work and his life in poverty are inevitable and that being obedient is a precondition for his salvation, he will not speak up against injustice or demand change. However, while Blake is critical of didacticism (moralizing), which he mocks in the final line of the first “The Chimney Sweeper,” he does not necessarily reject all value of Christian faith and consolation. Throughout his work, Blake condemns the institution of the church for its material and spiritual abuse of the disadvantaged, but he also celebrates genuine faith.

That faith is the faith of a child who believes without premeditation or calculation. The child’s innocence is precious, but it is also naïve and vulnerable. On the other hand, experience entails the loss of original innocence and immersion in practical, material concerns of life, yet it also leads to a more mature worldview that recognizes and perhaps challenges oppression. Blake believed in the need to overcome the flaws of both innocence and experience while drawing strength from each. This dialectical view, in which the advantages of two imperfect conditions can be melded into a more perfect one, is at the core of Blake’s philosophy.