When industrial revolution emerged from the ashes of the previous century, a new movement also emerged simultaneously. This movement as defined by one of its creators William Wordsworth was, in the preface of their collaborated work Lyrical Ballads with Samuel Coleridge, “"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."(Wordsworth 1) Although the definition matched with the psychological and literary situation of the era, a couple romantic authors existed outside of the definition. William Blake was different and defined as pre-romantic author by scholar. (Meibauer 184) Unlike the other romantic authors, Blake did not used the theme of nature regularly. (Mcgann 738) In his works, he depicted the problems of the newly industrialized society and tried to emphasize the world in the eyes of the common people especially children.
The chimney sweeper is the name of the two poems by William Blake. He created these poems to highlight the problems of the children in industrialized Britain, and to underline British government’s duties (Erdman 228). Everybody knew that the business chimney sweeping was a dirty one and lots of children had died because of the intoxication and unhealthy working conditions. Blake wanted to show this problems to the world and he wrote the book Songs of Innocence which was also illustrated by himself.
The first poem “The chimney sweeper” was written in more childlike language. As indicated in the title, Songs of Innocence, narrator had innocent tone and he accepted his fate. His father sent him to working while he was an infant. All he could do was crying “Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!” (3) Although he was working in hard condition...
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... and maybe he changed the course of English literature unintentionally. After his revolutionary literary pieces, man of letters who were influenced by him crated a new literary movement for the all innocent people out there. Especially for chimney sweepers…
Works Cited
Blake, William. Songs of innocence and of experience. Princeton, N.J.: William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1991. Print.
Erdman, David V.. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. 1991. E-book.
Gillespie, Gerald, Manfred Engel, Bernard Dieterle, and Bettina Meibauer. "Images of Childhood in Romantic children's literature." Romantic Prose Fiction. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co, 2008. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.
Mcgann, Jerome. "Rethinking romanticism." ELH, 59. 3 (1992): 735-754. JSTOR. Web. 10th Dec 2013.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical ballads. London: Penguin, 2006. Print.
While William Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence was written before the French Revolution and Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Experience was written after, creating obvious differences in formal structure; these poems are also uniquely intertwined by telling the same story of children arriving to church on Holy Thursday. However, each gives a different perspective that plays off each other as well the idea of innocence and experience. The idea that innocence is simply a veil that we are not only aware of but use to mask the horrors of the world until we gain enough experience to know that it is better to see the world for simply what it is.
Starting with the first stanza, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. He uses words such as died, weep, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child shares his family with us, stating his mother’s death and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”(Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child getting tossed into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “weep”, instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”(3). The fact that the child cried “weep” instead of sweep shows that the child could not be any older than four. Blake describes that they sleep in soot also meaning they are sleeping in their death bed. The average life span of children who work in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh work environment. The child portrays sorrow in the last line of the first stanza “So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”(4)
Griffith, John, and Charles Frey. Classics of Children's Literature. 6th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. 21-29, 322-374. Print.
Blake, William. Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Dover Publications, Inc., New York: 1992.
Instructor’s comment: This student’s essay performs the admirable trick of being both intensely personal and intelligently literary. While using children’s literature to reflect on what she lost in growing up, she shows in the grace of her language that she has gained something as well: an intelligent understanding of what in childhood is worth reclaiming. We all should make the effort to find our inner child
Sir William Blake was known for his lucid writings and childlike imagination when it came down to his writings. Some will say that his writings were like day and night; for example, "The Lamb" and "The Tiger" or "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found." Born in the 18th century, Blake witnessed the cruel acts of the French and American Revolutions so his writings also, "revealed and exposed the harsh realities of life (Biography William Blake)". Although he never gained fame during his lifetime, Blake's work is thought of as to be genius and well respected today. "The lack of public recognition sent him into a severe depression which lasted from 1810-1817, and even his close friends thought him insane (William Blake,)". Blake once stated, "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you (http://brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_blake.html )."
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are collections of poems that utilize the imagery, instruction, and lives of children to make a larger social commentary. The use of child-centered themes in the two books allowed Blake to make a crucial commentary on his political and moral surroundings with deceptively simplistic and readable poetry. Utilizing these themes Blake criticized the church, attacking the hypocritical clergy and pointing out the ironies and cruelties found within the doctrines of organized religion. He wrote about the horrific working conditions of children as a means to magnify the inequality between the poor working class and the well to do aristocracy.
... (eds), Children’s Literature Classic Text and Contemporary Trends, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan in association with Open University
Upon reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a certain parallel is easily discerned between them and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Blake, considered a radical thinker in his time, is today thought to be an important and seminal figure in the literature of the Romantic period. Being such a figure he has no doubt helped to influence many great thinkers throughout history, one of whom I believe is Carroll. There are many instances throughout Carroll’s story where comparable concepts of innocence and adulthood are evident. Through its themes of romanticism, Carroll crafts a story that is anti-didactic by its very nature.
Blake's portrayal of childhood is far from happy. A small child's mother dies while that child is still very young; this is sad but not all together strange. However the child's father then, very soon after, sells him off to be a chimney sweeper. Blake does not stop here; after a description these children's living conditions few emotions are left except for pity. As Americans living in the twenty first century, this all seams very strange. We see childhood as a time of joy, and innocence; a time to embrace, and to not let slip by too fast. We see childhood as Robert Frost does.
In 1789, English poet William Blake first produced his famous poetry collection Songs of Innocence which “combines two distinct yet intimately related sequences of poems” (“Author’s Work” 1222). Throughout the years, Blake added more poems to his prominent Songs of Innocence until 1794, when he renamed it Songs of Innocence and Experience. The additional poems, called Songs of Experience, often have a direct counterpart in Blake’s original Songs of Innocence, producing pairs such as “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” In Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake uses musical devices, structure, and symbolism to develop the theme that experience brings both an awareness of potential evil and a tendency that allows it to become dominant over childhood
The Song of Innocence and Experience is a collection of poems written by William Blake. “Innocence” and “Experience” are two definitions of consciousness that rethink John Milton’s existential-mythic states of “Paradise” and the “Fall”, this coincides with the romantic notion that adolescence is a state of protected innocence instead of original sin and yet is still not immune to the fallen world and its institutions.
William Blake is a poet and an illustrator. He is best known for two collections of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In the two collections there are often poems that are paired together to convey one of Blake’s five recurring themes. One of the themes Blake uses is how man is born innocent and is corrupted through experience. A pair of poems that illustrates this theme is “The Echoing Green” from Songs of Innocence and “The Garden of Love” from Songs of Experience. “The Echoing Green” portrays a child who is blissful and pure. “The Garden of love” depicts the same child who is now an adult coming back to where he used play; however, he is disheartened with the sight of corruption that he did not see as a child.
During the mid 1800’s was a remarkable era called the Romanticism. Some political and social milestones of this era included The American Revolution, The French Revolution, and The Industrial Revolution. During these events, the “theme” more or less was a type of laissez faire which means, “let the people do as they please.” WIlliam Blake was a famous poet in this time period, as well as Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and George Gordon. Novels and poems were written in this time to express the ways Romanticism was shown and how melancholy was trending.
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence. Right away in the first lines of the poem we learn through the child narrator that his life is about to change dramatically for the worse.