THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER (INNOCENCE)

Question 1

What happens in the poem?

Answer 1

• A young chimney sweep recounts his experiences of hardship and exploitation.
• Despite his circumstances, he believes optimsitically that he will find solace and happiness in heaven.

Question 2

What is the social context behind child labour and exploitation?

Answer 2

• Social critic of child labour practices that was prominent in England in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
• “Climbing boys” were sold by their parents to master sweeps (as young as 4)
• The “climbing boys” were expected to carry bags of heavy soot and remove soot from chimenys.
• Suffered from spinal deformaties, contracted testicular cancer.

Question 3

What were the chimney sweeper exepected to do?

Answer 3

• remove soot from chimenys and carry heavy bags of soot.

Question 4

When was the practice of chimney sweeping by minors abolished?

Answer 4

• 50 years after Blakes death

Question 5

What did Karl Marx say about religion?

Answer 5

• “Religion is the opium of the masses”

Question 6

What does “religion is the opium of the masses” mean?

Answer 6

• Religion is a tool of social control.
• That distracts workers from recognising their exploitation and material deprivition
• by focusing on the promise of salvation in the afterlife.

Question 7

What is false conciousness?

Answer 7

• A condition in which individuals adopt ideologies that are contrary to their own best interests or the interests of their social class.

Question 8

What did Rousseau say about civil freedoms?

Answer 8

• “Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains.”
• Rousseau asserts that modern states repress the physical freedom that is our birthright, and do nothing to secure civil freedom

Question 9

What did the Romantics think about freedom and nature?

Answer 9

• Nature serves as a symbol of freedom and authenticity .
• They saw it as a realm of unspoiled innocence
• Man has become alienated from nature

Question 10

Describe the structure of the poem

Answer 10

• Dramatic monologue
• AABB rhyme scheme
• Anapaestic rhythm
• 6 quatrains (2 rhyming couplets per quatrains)
• Cyclical structure (ends with moral platitudes about duty and children going to work)

Question 11

Symbolic interpretation of the poem

Answer 11

1. Suggests that religion is used as a tool of social control that distracts the chimney sweepers from recognising their exploitation and material deprivation.
2. Exploration of the limitations of the innocence perspective that prevents man from recognising the infinite possibilities of true perception and thus leads to repression. “without contraries there is no progression’
3. An exploration of the value of innocence against a debased, inequitable world.
4. Social critic of all the social institutions that cosign the oppression and exploitation of the most innocent amount man- including the established church, the ruling classes, and uncaring parents.

Question 12

Language used in the poem

Answer 12

• Epizeuxis, synechdoche
• Symbolism (mother-nurturing/ father-stern figures of authority like Urizen)
• Direct adress (Blake’s readers are complicit)
• Impersonal adress/ personal adress (naming figures like Tom Dacre)
• Binary oppositions (white hair/ soot)
• Homodiegetic speaker (empowered but remains nameless)
• Direct speech (inner resistance and community)
• Emotive language (coffins of black- the chimenys)

White hair- the job ages and wears down the body and brain of the children (closer to death)
Hush now- takes role of parent he never had

Question 13

Barthes, language and oppression

Answer 13

• “The oppressed is nothing, he has only one language, that of his emancipation.
• While ‘the oppressor is everything, his language is rich, multiform, supple’

Question 14

Religious Imagery

Answer 14

• Religious imagery (sacrifical lamb/ estastic vison of liberty/ angels as starirical image of false rhiteousness)
• “Naked and white” Prelapsarian image (Adam and Eve)
• Christian Regination