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William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper - Online Essays

William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper

In , Blake takes on the persona of a young chimney sweeper to tell a tale that is quite straightforward, yet ironic and sad at the same time. The voice of the poem is that of a young boy, characterized by the lines, "And my father sold me while yet my tongue/ Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep."(2-3) The boy is telling a story about how he became a chimney sweep, but mostly about another little boy named Tom Dacre who was also a chimney sweep and a dream little Tom had one night. The poem begins, "When my mother died I was very young"(1), and continues on about how his father sold him soon after, trading him into the life of a chimney sweep. The line that guilelessly lets the ...

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very practical in his manner of comforting little Tom, "Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare/ You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."(7-8) Tom is quieted, yet that same night he is visited by a dream wherein thousands of other chimney sweeps like him are all locked up in black coffins. An angel arrives and sets all the boys free to laugh and play and clean themselves, "Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,/ …/ the Angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy,/ He'd have God for his father & never want joy."(17, 19-20) Tom is so uplifted by his dream of what all chimney sweeps could expect after they die (at least according to the narrator), that despite the cold and the dark, Tom becomes "happy & warm".(23) The narrator ends the poem with a little pep-talk, letting all the other chimney sweeps who hear his tale, "So if all do their duty they need not fear harm."
This poem is not only a slice of life out of the world of two chimney sweeps, but it is ...

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William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper. (2007, August 5). Retrieved February 2, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/William-Blakes-The-Chimney-Sweeper/69156

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 8/5/2007 06:55:17 PM
Category: Poetry & Poets
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1134
Pages: 5

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