The Chimney Sweep

1) Yes, I agree with the editors of our textbook that Blake’s poetry had the power to enact social change by appealing to the imagination of the reader. I think that through painting the images of exhausted, overworked, and deprived children Blake was able to reach at emotion of the people. Through the words of his poetry, in both The Chimney Sweep from the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake verbally illustrates a picture of meek and mild mannered boy who has very much known nothing but his life as a child worker, where he is deprived of the major essentials of shelter, warmth, proper food, and love. Even though in the Songs of Innocence the boy, Tom Dacre, has a greater outlook on life and his place in heaven which lightens the mood of the poem it doesn’t take away from the main picture of an abused child. Both versions of the poem, even though they express different emotions from the point of view of the boy, the boy is still in the same situation. After analyzing both poems I believe that the boy described in both poem could possibly be the same boy. In Songs of Innocence, the boy has not experienced this world so long and still believes there is hope for a better future whether that future is here or in Heaven. In the Songs of Experience, the boy could be now jaded by the horrible world that he is forced to live in and has lost his once young childish idea about his fate.

2) The editors of the textbook might have included the Parliament transcript as a primary source document to transform the fictional child that Blake creates through his poems to a real living breathing boy who experienced this horrible type of life as a child laborer, or in my opinion child slave. This document for me brought the image I pictured in my head to life and made me think of what this must have been like to be the same situation as this young man. So for me the document made Blake’s poems that much more real for me. It made me happy for how far society where I live has progressed that this is not something that I need to fear for myself and the generations that follow me. But at the same time it saddens me that this is still occurring in other parts of the world.