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• #Chimney sweep how to#

The “Experience” version tells us how to understand the “Innocence” version and offers a kind of interpretation of it. The “Experience” version of the song speaks for the chimney sweep but does not show him, nor does it give us a representation of him, as the “Innocence” version does. But of course, this means he cannot say it, as he does in the poem. He is happy, he says, and does dance and sing and part of what is heartbreaking is the fact that he does not know how heartbreaking he is. The poem puts into the child’s mouth words that he could never say and indeed could not think. The latter version, in being explicit, is psychologically less creditable. In both poems Blake makes those cries of “Sweep sweep!” into lisps, to derive the grim irony by which they call out, “Weep weep!” They would go around advertising themselves with their cries. Chimney sweepers, or sweeps, were particularly egregious examples of the child labor endemic to England at the start of the Industrial Revolution children were used because they were small enough to scramble up and down the poisonously soot-choked chimneys they cleaned.

Both purport to be in the voice of a child chimney sweeper.

This contrast is particularly true in the “Chimney Sweeper” songs. But for just this reason the earlier song tends to be subtler, and the contrast between them also suggests that one of the losses in the move from innocence to experience is that of the subtlety- and the understanding by others that subtlety depends on-that characterizes the Songs of Innocence. In most of these pairings, the later song mounts a fiercer and more overt critique of the forces that have brought innocence into the disaster of experience than does the earlier song. The two chimney-sweeper poems in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience belong to the explicitly paired poems in the two books. Analysis of William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeperīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Febru