IN-The Chimney Sweeper

Question 1

What is the poem about?

Answer 1

about a child chimney sweep who dreams of Paradise and is thus able to cope dutifully with his work the following day

Question 2

At what age were children usually sold/apprenticed for being a chimney sweep?

Answer 2

around 7

Question 3

How does Blake put the identity of the “Angel” in a negative light?

Answer 3

as he questions whether it is right for Tom Dacre to go back happily to work, deluded by an entirely false sense of duty, being misled by his own innocence

Question 4

How can this poem be seen to be one of repression?

Answer 4

as the most vulnerable and damaged in society can be convinced that they have a part to play despite their exploitation

Question 5

The wretched figure of the child sweep is a key embelmb in Blakes poems of…..?

Answer 5

social protest

Question 6

Not only are the child sweep innocent victims of the cruellest exploitation but they are also associated with the smoke of industrialisation, thus uniting which two central Romantic preoccupations?

Answer 6

childhood and the impact of the industrial Revolution on the natural world

Question 7

What happened to many child sweeps?

Answer 7

they suffered deformities and testicular cancer as a result

Question 8

When was the practise abolished?

Answer 8

50 years after the death of Blake

Question 9

What is the poem?

Answer 9

a dramatic monologue

Question 10

How does the reader too become implicated in the childs exploitation?

Answer 10

as he remarks “so your chimneys I sweep”

Question 11

What is central to the poem which is contrasted?

Answer 11

the grim realities of the sweepers lives and the ecstatic vision of liberty contained in the dream of Tom Dacre

Question 12

Where does the dream of Tom Dacre take place?

Answer 12

in a pastoral idyll ‘a green plain’ where there is colour, light, pleasure and laughter

Question 13

Where in the dream the pastoral idyll-‘a green plain’ is presented where there is colour, light and laughter; what is the real world?

Answer 13

a monochrome, dark world subject to the pressures of city life and a capitalist economy where the boys can only weep over their degradation

Question 14

What does the angel say who releases the sweeps with a “bright key”?

Answer 14

that “if he’d be a good boy’He’d have God for a father and never want joy”

Question 15

Where is the stipulation (condition) given by the angel that “if he’d be a good boy’He’d have God for a father and never want joy” repeat?

Answer 15

in the last line where the boys “need not fear harm” if “all do their duty”

Question 16

The stipulation given by the Anegl that “if he’d be a good boy’He’d have God for a father and never want joy” is repeated in the last line wherehe boys “need not fear harm” if “all do their duty”. However such a submission seem an unlikely prescription from a social critic like Blake. What could Blake be implying through this?

Answer 16

that while it is true that the dream helped Tom endure his misery (he feels “happy and warm” when he awakens) it becomes clear that Blake is not advocating passive acceptance of earthly misery, he is exposing its futility in stopping the practise

Question 17

How is it clear that Tom Dacres dream helps him endure his misery?

Answer 17

as he feels “happy and warm” when he awakens

Question 18

What does Tom Dacre act as ?

Answer 18

a foil to the speaker

Question 19

Blake decries what in the poem?

Answer 19

the use of promised future happiness as a way of subduing the oppressed

Question 20

Blake decries the use of promised future happiness as a way of subduing the oppressed; why?

Answer 20

as this same promise was often used by those in power to maintain the status quo so that workers and the weak would not unite to stand against the inhuman conditions forced upon them

Question 21

What becomes more clear in Blakes’ Songs of Experience but is touched upon in Innocence?

Answer 21

That the poet had little patience with palliative measures that did nothing to alter the present suffering of impoverished families

Question 22

What is Tom Dacre comforted in his dream?

Answer 22

the promise of a future outside the “coffin” that is his life’s lot

Question 23

How is Tom Dacre’s life only made bearable?

Answer 23

by the two-edged hope of a happy afterlife following a quick death

Question 24

Blake here critiques not just the deplorable conditions of the children sold into chimney sweeping, but also the society and particularly the religious aspect. Why?

Answer 24

as they would offer these children palliatives rather than aid, the “angel” represents the church

Question 25

What was the average life of a sweep?

Answer 25

one of destitution and exploitation

Question 26

Blake melds the word ‘'’weep!’weep!’weep!” to that effect?

Answer 26

this accentuates the youth of the children with the pronunciation of sweep lisped “weep”

Question 27

What did the Angel do?

Answer 27

opened the coffins containing the bodies and set all the bodies free from the bondage of coffins

Question 28

What does Blake intend when he writes that “They rise upon clouds”?

Answer 28

this image of clouds floating freely is Blake’s metaphor for the freedom from the material boundaries of the body

Question 29

“Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm” What does this quote show?

Answer 29

the antithesis between the vision of summer and this dark, cold reality is deeply ironic

Question 30

What do the “coffins of black” symbolise?

Answer 30

the claustrophobic confinement of chimneys which compare to coffins to their young occupants

Question 31

What do “coffins of black” suggest about human bodies?

Answer 31

that they were more or less prisons for the soul

Question 32

What is a negative about focussing the child only on the hope of release in the future?

Answer 32

this thereby gives him a false idea about his body and so his freedom to change his life

Question 33

What is significant about “wash in a river”?

Answer 33

with the poor sanitation at this time and no running water, washing in a river represented a thorough clean, as well as evoking a pastoral idyll

Question 34

Underlying the poem is the fact that the speaker is a child and thus all Blake’s associations with the image of the child are therefore in the background of the poem and affect our understanding of it. However the word child is not used which means that we have to remind ourselves that it is a child is speaking, why?

Answer 34

as society has forgotten this; to society they are sweepers not children

Question 35

the children are “down a green plain” which i the colour associated with?

Answer 35

growth, fertility and spring

Question 36

Usually places of “green plain” were not owned by anyone but were common land; what did this therefore represent?

Answer 36

another kind of freedom from the rule or demands of a landowner or authority figure

Question 37

Black attacks the pious hope of future solace in heaven, who is this advocated by as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable reality of injustice and exploitation?

Answer 37

By some Christians

Question 38

Blake in this poem attacks the pious hope of future solace in heaven, advocated by some Christians as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable reality of injustice and exploitation. What is Blakes view of this?

Answer 38

that this was a distorted perspective of fallen humanity

Question 39

Christian teaching about respecting authority led to the sense that being ‘good’ meant accepting the status quo as though it had been designed by God to be that way. What quote supports this?

Answer 39

“And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy”

Question 40

In Blake’s work how are parents often perceived?

Answer 40

as inhibiting and repressing their children

Question 41

How does Blake suggest that the parents in his poems inhibit and repress their children?

Answer 41

through communicating their own fears and shame to the next generation through the parental desire to ‘protect’ them from their sexuality and desires

Question 42

Parents misuse care to repress children rather than setting the children free by rejoicing in and safeguarding what?

Answer 42

their capacity for play and imagination

Question 43

How does father in the Chimney Sweeper betray his own son?

Answer 43

by abuisng his authority and selling him into an apprenticeship ‘ whether by necessity or choice, he has colluded with the system of oppression

Question 44

What did Blake believe about humans?

Answer 44

that they are essentially spiritual beings and that the body should be an expression of a person’s spiritual nature

Question 45

Why does Blake believe that people are trapped?

Answer 45

as they believe that their bodies are purely physical and so they are trapped in a materialist approach to life; unable to themselves experience the world spiritually

Question 46

This poem immediately concerns tus with the nature of innocence as Black saw it. How does Blake suggest we should see the attitude of the children?

Answer 46

we are forced to see through this ideology of repression and see the narrator as a ‘victim of innocence’ who needs to be enlightened to their exploitation

Question 47

What question does Blake pose to us?

Answer 47

He asks if innocence is valuable or a service of manipulation and greed

Question 48

Blake critises the religious idea that we can just change our attitudes to enjoy that which is loathsome. What is ironic about this?a

Answer 48

as it appears that region colludes with tyranny, offering false pleasures to ensure we do not challenge our masters

Question 49

The scene presented by the dream is quote obviously redolent (reminiscent) of what?

Answer 49

of Paradise

Question 50

tom himself and the narrator are deluded by a dream, a fallacy in which the only time where they may :shine in the sun: is in death. Why is this futile?

Answer 50

as this prevents change and perpetuates the issue

Question 51

Why does Blake say that the exercise of innocence may all to innocence may all too rapidly conduce to this death if we persist to do what?

Answer 51

to not understand the facts of experience no matter how damaging and wearying they may seem otherwise we shall continue to submit to the most appalling of practises

Question 52

How can the “Angel” be seen as bad in comparison to say the devil?

Answer 52

as Angels’ stand for a righteous purity which brakes the energy and imagination enacted by the devil

Question 53

In Blakes view what did Christianity tend to place its highest valuations on; whereas he had sought one of fire, enthusiasm and enegery to allow every person and creature individuality (e.g the fly)?

Answer 53

on submissive and conventional behaviour

Question 54

Why did Blake sought for a religion of fire, enthusiasm and energy?

Answer 54

to allow every person and creature individuality, untrammelled by the power of the State or by the restrictions of reason