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".