chimney sweep annotations

Through the focus on the child’s loss of innocence.

This focus on the child’s lost innocence helps Blake comment on the injustice children experienced in the age of the Industrial revolution. It helps Blake get the image of this child into the minds of readers. It makes them feel pity and subsequently it helps them recognise the injustice faced.

“Crying ‘weep, weep’”

• This repetitive crying of one word reminiscent of bird. Birds are often implied to be fragile and this connection shows how fragile the chimney sweep is.
• It reminds the reader the chimney sweep is a child and starts a trend of those reminders.
• These reminders of the chimney sweep’s youth are then contrasted with the things he experiences.
• Repetition of the word ‘weep’ and the connotations of ‘crying’, melancholy and pain, creates a semantic field of sadness that permeates the whole poem.

Regular rhyme scheme and mostly steady rhythm (AABB CACA DEDE)

• Mimics the sound of a nursery rhyme and gives the rhyme a certain childishness harshly contrasted by the bleak and sad content of the poem.
• The rhythm is broken in some parts by exclamations which reflect the child’s innocence being broken by the things he has to endure.

3 stanzas of 4 lines each

Simplicity of the structure and lines juxtapose the child’s increasingly cynical and complex world view.

‘I was happy upon the heath’

• Image of a happy child is juxtaposed with the semantic field of sadness set up in the first stanza and it shows the child’s loss of happiness and innocence.
• Use of past tense highlights how this happy existence doesn’t exist anymore and is replaced by sadness.
• Reflective tone also indicates maturity which should not be there at the assumed age of this chimney sweep. The repeated soft ‘h’ sounds also suggest the freedom the chimney sweep had back then.

Through focusing on religion as a damaging force in the child’s life, contrasting it to how religion is usually presented (glorified and praised)

Blake uses the focus and reference to religion to show how it was used (and still is used) as a tool of manipulation of the masses. The blind following of God by the parents, to the extent that they leave their own child in the snow to go to church, shows how that kind of blind faith can be damaging and also how it can be someone’s escape from the world.

‘gone up to the church to pray.’

• Shows the importance of religion in the parents’ lives. They are going to church as ‘good Christians’ but leaving a child alone in the cold.
• Use of dialogue to introduce the parents and their neglect helps Blake show realistic human emotion and in this case, the chimney sweep’s suffering.
• ‘gone’ has connotations of neglect and loneliness.
• ‘up’ implies that church is higher in morality and ‘better’ By going the parents are trying to be better people.

‘gone to praise God and his priest and king’

• Shows how the parents believe that God has done something and has made their lives better, since verb ‘praise’ commonly used as synonym to give thanks.
• This belief is firmly in contrast with what the child is experiencing.
• Polysyndetic list carries spiteful tone and suggests the child’s bitterness because of how he is left behind by his parents.
• This is reinforced by the continuous use of ‘gone’ when referring to the church and religion.

‘make up a heaven of our misery’

• Shows how the child has lost his belief in religion and how he believes that religion has had a hand in his suffering.
• ‘make up’ denotes lying and something fictitious. It suggests the child has lost faith in religion because of his experiences.
• ‘misery’ is an impactful final word which highlights the harm done to the boy by religion.
• ‘a heaven’ suggests that the heaven they are ‘making up’ isn’t real since there is usually only one Heaven. However it still has connotations of goodness and a promise of eternal happiness but not for the boy.

By highlighting how neglectful the chimney sweeper’s parents are.

This presentation of the parents as neglectful elicits more sympathy from the reader while also highlighting the society that forces the parents to do this. Blake doesn’t take blame off of the parents, he instead blames both the parents and the system while portraying the chimney sweep as the product of both of their neglect.

‘clothed me in the clothes of death’

• Contrast of the caring verb ‘clothed’ and the ‘clothes of death’ show how the parents are failing at their caring job and that they are harming the child.
• The child being the passive object in this sentence shows how he doesn’t have any agency in what he is being forced to do.
• ‘clothes of death’ shows how tattered his clothes are since clothes are supposed to keep someone protected from the elements, not kill them. The fact that they can’t do that shows they’re damaged.
• Also a metaphor for the responsibility the boy wears for his family.

‘taught me to sing the notes of woe’

• Shows how the parents are doing their job but in a warped and wrong way. Parents are supposed to teach children, which is what the parents are doing, but they’re teaching the chimney sweep the wrong things.

• ‘sing’ has connotations of freedom and joy. The combination of ‘sing’ with ‘woe’ adds to the semantic field of sadness.

• it also perpetrates a metaphor started in the first stanza, creating a memorable impression of the child as something bird-like.

‘Where are thy father and mother, say?’

• The addressing of the chimney sweep by the speaker humanises him and it puts into focus the neglect of his parents by mentioning their absence.
• This is the first introduction to the parents but they become something that haunts the poem and reader while they are going through the poem.
• The absence of the parents makes the child’s experience more pitiful and impactful.