Diction And Imagery In Blake's "The Cimney Sweper"

Diction and Imagery in Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper”

Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Ð' Children are now welcomed to earth as presents bundled in pinks and blues. In the 1800’s children were treated as workers straight from the womb. Children trained early in age to perform unbearable tasks (Ward 3). Imagine how it felt to be unwanted by a parent and sold to a master who also cared nothing about them. Many children earned a few pennies by becoming chimney sweeps or working in the streets running errands, calling cabs, sweeping roads, selling toys or flowers and helping the market porters (Ward 3). The young children did not have much choice on which job (life) they wanted, but by far sweeping chimneys was the most dangerous. The children were forced into confined areas filled with comb webs, where they sacrificed their lives to clean. William Blake does a great job depicting hardship of children in the 1800’s in “The Chimney Sweeper” through the use of diction and imagery.

Ð' Starting with the first stanza, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. He uses words such as died, weep, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child shares his family with us, stating his mother’s death and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”(Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child getting tossed into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “weep”, instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”(3). The fact that the child cried “weep” instead of sweep shows that the child could not be any older than four. Blake describes that they sleep in soot also meaning they are sleeping in their death bed. The average life span of children who work in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh work environment. The child portrays sorrow in the last line of the first stanza “So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”(4)

A name is given in the second stanza “Tom Dacre” used to show the realism of the event described in the poem. The second stanza contains the only simile in this poem, “That curl’d like a lamb’s back”(6), symbolizing the lamb as innocence and when they shave the child’s head it’s like they are taking the innocence away from the child. In the second stanza two children are having a conversation about an unwanted hair cut. Blake uses "Hush, Tom! Never mind it, for when your head's bare” (7) in the second stanza to draw attention to the reader. Trying to comfort, the other child says that it is not that bad, because the soot would ruin his white hair anyway while working in the chimneys. The white hair of the child also symbolizes the young age because his hair has yet to darken. The image of a bald child crying in the dark covered in black soot brings discomfort to the reader, which is what Blake intended to do.

In the third stanza the child escapes reality in a dream. Tom laid there quiet and that night when he went to sleep he had a wonderful dream “And so he was quiet, & that very night, As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight”(9-10). In Tom’s dream he sees himself and “Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack” (other chimney sweeps) “lock’d” up in black coffins “That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black”(11-12). The color black is used in this stanza as a symbol of evilness and the word coffins is used as a symbol of death. The coffins also represent being locked up in a chimney for a lifetime. The color black in this stanza is used to clash with the child’s white hair that was just shaved off earlier. Yet again Blake is showing the reader that the innocence of this child is stripped away.

Although happiness is known to be out of reach for these young chimney sweepers, they still hope for it. In the fourth stanza Tom is still dreaming about being set free from his life as a chimney sweep. Blake uses many more joyous words in this stanza such as bright, laughing, and shines to show the optimism in the children’s minds. The sweeps need freedom from these coffins (chimneys), but they cannot free themselves. The Angel portrayed in this stanza can free them and he does “And he open’d the coffins & set them all free” (14). The Angel is symbolizing friends that want to help these children live happier.

The Angel sets all of the chimney sweeper’s free, freedom of life without torture and pain. Blake states that the boys go running through a green plain leaping and laughing and the boys then wash themselves in a river “And wash in a river and shine in the sun” (16). Blake is stating that the boys are enjoying themselves and also cleansing their sins away. Blake conveys imagery in stanza four