The Chimney Sweeper (Innocence)

Question 1

The Chimney Sweeper Stanza 1 - 3 key techniques and analysis

Answer 1

1. ‘Your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep’

• Direct address to readers implicates us, forces self examination of our treatment of poor
• Internal rhyme draws attention to this message

2. ‘When my mother died I was very young and my father sold me’

• Sympathetic characterisation straight away, dead maternal figure, absent paternal figure
• ‘Very young’, qualifier pushes the child’s innocence and therefore our sympathies

3. ‘Weep, weep, weep, weep’

• 4x use of non verbal utterance underscores despair
• Also a youthful pun, child is unable to say ‘sweep’ so lisps ‘weep’, furthers youthful characterisation

Question 2

The Chimney Sweeper Stanza 1 - 2 key techniques and analysis

Answer 2

1. ‘Little Tom Dacre’ ‘Who cried when his head that curl’d like a lamb’s back was shav’d’

• Foregrounding of ‘little’ emphasises boy’s innocence, Use of proper name creates elevated sympathy
• ‘curl’d like lamb’ - Traditional symbol of innocence, also a traditional association of Jesus (Lamb to the slaughter)

2. ‘You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair’

• Colour imagery of pure ‘white’ contrasted against the corrupt, black soot
• Childlike wisdom, power of innocence to get through hard times

Question 3

The Chimney Sweeper Stanza 3 - 1 key technique and analysis

Answer 3

‘Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black’

• Listing of proper nouns creates voice of hyperbolic child, also humanises the chimney sweeps
• ‘Coffins of black’, deathly imagery, very morbid when associated with children
• Colour imagery of ‘Black’ connotes soot, chimney sweeping will kill these boys

Question 4

The Chimney Sweeper Stanza 4 - 2 key techniques

Answer 4

1. ‘Down a green plain’ ‘Wash in a river’ ‘Shine in the sun’

• Triple emphasis on the joys of nature, critique of urban life
• ‘Wash’ perhaps evokes natural baptism
• Emphasis on cleanliness and light to show childhood virtue

2. ‘Came an angel who had a bright key’

• ‘Bright key’ alludes to the supernatural
• Perhaps a critique of religion, asking why God / the Church does not choose to help these children

Question 5

The Chimney Sweeper Stanza 5 - 2 key techniques

Answer 5

‘Naked and white’

• Imagery of purity and a return to natural life
• Colour symbolism of purity and innocence

‘Good boy’ ‘ He’d have God for his father’

• Almost like Santa, continuing the child’s voice and perspective with this interpretation of religion
• However, demand of obedience perhaps a critique of organised religion

Question 6

The Chimney Sweeper Stanza 6 - 1 key technique

Answer 6

1. ‘Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm’ ‘harm’

• Comforting semantics to show the effect of religion / imagination
• Perhaps a similar interp to Marx, Religion the opium of the people
• Subversion of the rhyme scheme creates a disharmonious ending, suggesting that the problem has not been solved by faith, only lessened

Question 7

The Chimney Sweeper - 2 Broad Contexts

Answer 7

1. Chimney Sweepers in London

• After the great fire of london, chimneys were made smaller, so children as young as 4 were made to sweep them
• Many children died of suffocation or developed cancer
• One kind of skin cancer was so common, it became known as sweep’s cancer

2. Blake on the imagination

• Blake saw imagination as the most powerful tool humans had, arguing it allowed us to break into a new level of existence
• He famously said ‘He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God.’

Question 8

The Chimney Sweeper - 2 critics

Answer 8

1. Robert Pinsky observes that the poem’s opening lines are “musical” yet “miserable,”
2. W.B. Yeats asserts that Blake viewed imagination as “the first emanation of divinity,” considering it central to human experience.