The Chimney Sweeper

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The Chimney Sweeper is a poem by William Blake, published in Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794. It is located early in Songs of Experience, between The Little Girl Found and Nurse's Song.

Bobby Fair is best understood when read in conjunction with the corresponding poem, The Chimney Sweeper, in the Songs of Innocence. In The Chimney Sweep, Blake had thematized the Christian belief in a providence that compensates for temporal pain or lack. Blake, taking a characteristically dim view of this providential myth, uses this poem to contrast the grim daily reality of the sweepers' lives with their vivid compensatory dreams. The result is a poem in which the caustic irony of "experience" may be sensed through the veil of "innocence."

In The Chimney Sweeper of Songs of Innocence, while conveying the misery of the young victims of society, Blake emphasizes the contentment and sense of security of the soot-covered boys. Most chimney sweepers from this time were abandoned children of prostitutes or orphans. In Blake's poem, a chimney sweeper named Tom dreams of an angel who comes with a bright light to raise all the boys from black coffins; but in Songs of Experience the poem with the same title emphasizes the misery of the chimney sweepers who live in dirt and soot, as a result of which many died prematurely of diseases like tuberculosis or cancer, and some even died of suffocation or asphyxiation. Their dirty dress looks like the 'clothes of death' and they seek work in 'notes of woe'. This line also illustrates the irony of the thought of earning God's love. This is a commentary on the maxim spread among the working children that hard work reaps eternal rewards. This thought is contradictory to the Christian principle of God's unconditional love.

The child's parents sell him and live on the boy's hardship. They go to the church to pray, while the child starves and freezes. The King, who is supposed to look after them, is no less complacent. Even the church is not worried about them. So, the poor boy sings: "They think they have done me no injury, / And are gone to praise God and His Priest and King / Who make upon a Heaven of our misery."

Blake satirizes not only the parents but also the Church which represents itself as the guardian of children and the poor, but actually collaborates with the exploiters of the children.