Literary Criticism on "The Chimney Sweeper" (Songs of Innocence)
from Wicksteed, J. Blake's Innocence and Experience. London: JM Dent & Sons LTD, 1928
The poem begins with a line of extreme simplicity. It is only the second line's reinforcement of the beat and its rhyme that fashions it into verse. The third line again takes up one of the feet (iambs), and the forth line the other (anapests), so as still further to emphasize the metrical qualities of the first prose sentence. It is as though Blake had picked up a common stone from the road, and worked it into a jewel.
When my mother died I was very young
is prose until Blake has completed the verse, and then it is song. In his 1095 edition of Blake's poems, Dr Sampson put an apostrophe before the four times repeated "weep" to suggest that the little boy's cry meant "sweep". Most editors have followed him since; but though there is very little doubt that this was Blake's meaning, it is equally certain that he meant the word to represent sorrow and be connected with the child's earliest cries. In "Experience" he says:
A little black thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
were the chimney-sweeper is clearly following his trade; and we may suppose his cry "sweep sweep"(uttered like one word with the accent on the second syllable and the "s" hardly heard) was a common sound in the morning streets of Blake's youth, such as his readers would recognize without the apostrophe or accent. The poem is closely connected and contrasted with "The Little Black Boy". In both we begin with the mother, and are led by vision tot he Divine father. In both an earthly darkness of the flesh is escaped spiritually. In both the "white" or "silver" hair seems to have a specially spiritual significance. In both one little boy helps and protects another by his love and thought. But whereas one dwells in the southern wild and dark by nature, the other lives in the crowded city, and his blackened skin represents the cruelty of man. A very little reflection shows that there is something systematic in the story. It is not for nothing that the child's vision follows immediately after his being given the idea that his "white hair" is potentially there just as much when it is shaved off as before; and by being removed into a region of ideas it can no longer be sullied by earthly soot. This Platonic thought is more that a momentary comfort; it becomes a vision; and "that very night" Tom has a dream if an angel with a key. On the surface, the dream represents something that happens, or is to happen after death. Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack are in their coffins. But the discerning eye will see in those coffins the circumstances of their living bodies, not their dead ones. The angel's key is the Platonic though that things in the mind are the most real. This makes every spirit free. White and naked, the soot bags of earth are left below, they float on the clouds of vision. Then the same angel tells Tom not that when he dies he will go to heaven, but that by being god he can have God for his father all the time, and "never" want joy, for we can dwell with God always, once we realize his inward presence. It is very significant that God's fatherhood is unconditional. For the child or man who has not he key of imagination or vision, "no father is there". For those who have he is there always. So far dream of vision, but now as always we return to earth, where the test of vision lies. Happiness is not something to be realized only in "an allegorical abode where existence hath never come," but, if at all, here and now. The angelic key, discovered in dreams, turns the wards of the lock of Tom's earthly and living coffin:
then suddenly the most trite and commonplace little moral:
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
Is that possible that Blake has taken all this trouble to show us that we ought to get up in the morning? The "duty" is not, surely, the sweeping of chimneys but the dreaming of dreams. And yet not quite that either, but rather so to comfort one another with visionary thought that our dreams shall undo the hardship of rising in the dark and cold.