Analysis of "the Chimney Sweeper"

William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper," is a short poem about young children who are placed into a life of hard labor. In his poem, Blake uses symbolism, naiveté, innocence, simile, and imagery to describe the awful existence of the young chimney sweepers. While Blake's poem portrays that one day the young children will go to heaven, it also holds a much deeper meaning in symbolic, spiritual, and moral significance.

Blake begins his poem by introducing the speaker, a young child in an ill-fated existence. Blake illustrates the innocence and naiveté of the speaker when he talks about his father selling him after his mother's death.

"When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue,

Could scarcely cry weep weep weep."

The naïve child accepts his plight and does not condemn his father for his troubles, but accepts his fate. The weep weep weep depicts the sound of a broom, sweep sweep sweep.

In the second stanza, Blake uses symbolism to further reveal the innocence of the boys.

"There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,

Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair"

While it is apparent the speaker gives Tom comfort in the loss of his hair, there is much more going on symbolically and spiritually. Blake uses a simile in line six to compare Tom's white hair to that of a lamb's back. The lamb can be seen as the Lamb of God, and a symbol of innocence. In shaving Tom's head, his innocence and spirituality are lost.

In the third stanza Blake extends the focus from the narrator and Tom to the other sweepers who share a similar fate.

"And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight,

That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack

Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black."

Tom's dreams are his only escape from his dreadful life, yet this particular dream is of the young children being locked in black coffins. The coffins are symbolic for death, and the blackness represents the darkness of being restricted inside a chimney.

The naiveté of Tom appears again in the fifth stanza. He believes there is still room for hope and happiness in his life.

"And by came an Angel who had