The Chimney Sweeper “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake was set in a time around the French Revolution. It begins when a little boy, named Tom, around the age of five or six has a dream. With his mother diseased, his father sells him to what I believe to be a chimney sweep business. Tom has a dream all the children will be released and then if they do what they’re told will be taken care of by God. The poem shows the hardship that the children in that time era face every day. In William Blake’s, “The Chimney Sweeper”, he uses imagery, diction, and figurative speech to show the innocence and naivety of children. First, this poem reflects imagery in the innocence and naivety of the little boy Tom. Throughout the poem it sets the image as …show more content…
“You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.” (Blake, 7). When I look at the word spoil, dark and altered come to mind. They also throw in “white” hair into the sentence. I took this as society/the world is dark and has corrupted the children think things should be and their innocence. This is another example of how naïve Tom really is. The poem also shows diction when naming the thousands of chimney sweepers. “Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,” (Blake, 11) are all basic names. The author chooses those basic names to show actually how many chimney sweeps there was. Basic names, basic people; it didn’t matter who but you had to be a chimney sweep. This shows how Tom is naïve by him thinking one day if he did everything that he was told he would be taken care of by God. Lastly, in “The Chimney Sweeper”, William Blake uses figures of speech to show the innocence and naivety of children in this time era. In lines 21/22 the children are getting up to work and it’s dark. Notice the dark image has returned. Also how many children in today’s society get up to work? And how many children get up to work so early its dark outside? This picture just shows how they took their innocence away from them because they had to have the children working. “Blake uses dark as a metaphor for the dark lives the children lead.”(Smpoop Editorial Team,
The fact that they feel they can sit about the knee of their mother, in this stereotypical image of a happy family doesn’t suggest that the children in this poem are oppressed... ... middle of paper ... ... y has a negative view of the childish desire for play which clearly has an effect on the children. The fact that they the are whispering shows that they are afraid of the nurse, and that they cannot express their true thoughts and desires freely, which is why they whisper, and therefore shows that Blake feels that children are oppressed. I feel that the two poems from innocence which are ‘The Echoing Green,’ and ‘The Nurses Song,’ display Blake’s ideological view of country life which I referred to in my introduction, and show his desire for childhood to be enjoyed.
A name is given in the second stanza “Tom Dacre” used to show the realism of the event described in the poem. The second stanza contains the only simile in this poem, “That curl’d like a lamb’s back”(6), symbolizing the lamb as innocence and when they shave the child’s head it’s like they are taking the innocence away from the child.
By using scarecrows to represent the peasants, Dickens successfully portrays the theme of inhumanity. He states, “But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no warning” (Dickens 23). The nobles dress flamboyantly and spend their days being entertained, similar to the birds. The peasants are frail looking with baggy clothes resembling the appearance of scarecrows. While they want to scare nobles away, the peasants do not have enough strength to overpower the aristocrats who abuse them day and night. The nobles ignore all weakness of the peasants and take advantage of them. They pay attention to their fancy clothes and spend their days wasting money by being entertained when the peasants continue to fail to scare away their persecutors. The peasants continuously search for food desperately trying to sustain life while being taken advantage of. They are starved, for...
I will go into detail on Thomas’s tone and the emotion within the poem. Lastly, I will analyze the four stanzas that help symbolize Thomas’s image of his father.
Growing up is a natural part of life. Everyone grows up. The loss of childish innocence and blind faith in what is said is one chief mark of growing up. Loss of innocence, however, presents itself in many forms, even to adults, and with it brings a greater understanding of the world at large. In literature, authors use the process to explore society and humanity. Through the characters’ loss of innocence, the authors of both To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice & Men discuss ideas of prejudice, family, and courage.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
The prominent theme that was exhibited throughout the novel was inhumanity. The quote "Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky." This quotation shows how a powerful authority had all the control to carry out disturbing actions and no common ma...
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
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
An intriguing yet commonplace subject in literature, childhood contains multiple themes—both subtle and blatant—that often illustrate a child's journey through and discovery of the world. Said themes include topics such as: love, loss of innocence, struggle with identity, and others. In one such story written by James Joyce, a few childhood themes are discussed through the lens of both direct and indirect characterization. Children playing in muddy alleyways, a profession of love in a veiled drawing-room, and a climax formed around the realization of blatant frustration all bring to light themes of epiphany, loss of childlike hope, and courtly infatuation with a young maiden in "Araby."
Along with the imagery we get from the title, there is a lot of imagery within this poem. Let us start with the first three lines:
Ultimately, Romanticism is responsible for transforming the purpose of children’s literature and, as a result, society's image of children. Thus, helping to establish the importance of the imagination. Through its themes of romanticism, Carroll crafts a story that is anti-didactic by its very nature. The innocence and imagination of childhood offers redemption to fallen adulthood.
In the William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the vision of children and adults are placed in opposition of one another. Blake portrays childhood as a time of optimism and positivity, of heightened connection with the natural world, and where joy is the overpowering emotion. This joyful nature is shown in Infant Joy, where the speaker, a newborn baby, states “’I happy am,/ Joy is my name.’” (Line 4-5) The speaker in this poem is portrayed as being immediately joyful, which represents Blake’s larger view of childhood as a state of joy that is untouched by humanity, and is untarnished by the experience of the real world. In contrast, Blake’s portrayal of adulthood is one of negativity and pessimism. Blake’s child saw the most cheerful aspects of the natural wo...
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.
“William Blake (1757-1827) was an artist, poet, mystic, visionary and radical thinker.” (4) London comes from ‘Songs of innocence and Experience’ written by Blake in the 1790’s. The poem presents an incredibly negative view of London. In Blake’s view, the terrible living conditions are what caused physical, moral, and spiritual decay. The image of “the Chimney-sweepers cry/ Every blackening church appalls” conveys Blake’s attitude towards The Church of England. He doesn’t agree in having money spent on church buildings, while children live in poverty; forced to clean chimneys. Blake perceives this lack of compassion as a mockery of the beliefs of love and care that Christianity is founded on. In the third verse, we encounter the line, “blood down Palace walls”. This is a clear allusion to the French Revolution which took place only a few years before London was written. Blake also sees rapid urbanization as dangerous and unhealthy for humanity.