Literary Criticism on 
"THE Chimney Sweeper" (Songs of Experience)

from Wicksteed, J. Blake's Innocence and Experience. London: JM Dent & Sons LTD, 1928

    This is the simplest of the social poems of Experience.   The first verse was not written at the same time as the second and third,   which are written to a different rhyme scheme.
    The mood is characteristic of the disillusionment of Experience and embraces in its attack parents, Church, God, priest, king and their conception of heaven, omitting to mention only the "soldier" so frequently in Blake's mind.  But though it was no doubt sincere and is even not overstated - for there is something rotten in the spiritual and material complacency that is undisturbed by the misery of society's substructure - yet it was less effective for its purpose than "The Chimney Sweeper"  of Innocence.   That was a poem entirely without bitterness, and left the moral to the readers' own reason and conscience.  It was even during Blake's lifetime as propaganda, and was no doubt the germ of Kingsley's "Water Babies".