Poem Analysis Of Tom Daborn By William Blake

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The poem consists of six stanzas with four lines and a rhyming pattern of the last syllable in the line, AABB, called couplet.
The first stanza opens with a sad remark about the death of the speaker's mother when he was “very young”, and continues on how his father “sold” him. The reader should bear in mind the social circumstances of the late 18th century and the difficult position of a widower who suddenly has the obligation to raise a child, or possible a few of them, which was not common in that period. In order to ease his own life, the father sells the poor child to the chimney sweep master, maybe naively thinking that the master would provide him a better life, or more possibly, to earn some money. The unpleasant event probably occurred …show more content…

Blake uses simile “curled like a lamb's back” to describe the beauty of Tom’s hair, and to show compassion to the little crying boy. The speaker tries to comfort Tom diminishing the awful fact of the bare head by saying that dirt can not now smear his delicate curly hair. The appearance of the “white hair” and curly lamb’s fleece can be figured out as a comparison of the poor boy forced to clean chimneys and get dirty, with innocent lamb taken as an image of sacrifice. The lamb is often used as a symbol for Jesus, so Blake probably wanted to emphasize the meaning of Tom’s sacrifice, pain, and the eventual redemption in future.
The speaker, in the third stanza, informs the reader about Tom’s dream, or probably, the nightmare, although it could also be a vision, as Blake experienced visions since he was a little boy. He talks about thousands of chimney sweep children exploited for cleaning flues, using traditional names to emphasize the amount of poor young people enslaved in the late 18th century. “Coffins of black” might be a metaphor for the rough working conditions for climbers and narrow chimneys or the real coffins which could get dirty from sooty bodies and clothes of the dead chimney

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