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The Chimney Sweeper William Blake Analysis

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Romanticism and Industrialization: Analysing the couplet poem The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake William Blake is an English poet and a painter. He was born in London, on 28th November 1757. Blake was born into a family of moderate means. However his parents encouraged his artistic talents. Blake was a Romantic poet as he wrote during the Romantic period. “Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that arose in Europe in the mid 18th century as an alternative to the ideals of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment” Blake, during romanticism poets and writers emphasized more on the importance of human emotions, imagination and sensitivity over science and reason which made romanticism different from other periods. William …show more content…

Graham (2008) says “we were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us”, this is exactly what Blake is depicting in his poem. The Chimney Sweeper: the innocent does not see the cruelty of the adults while the experienced mourn their existence in the contamination of the adult world which is symbolic of the effected group of people during the industrial revolution. In the poem both the children are misled into working for the aristocrats as their chimney sweepers. They were sold before they could hardly pronounce words properly and hear lies saying that their heads are shaved to save their hair: “my fathers sold me while yet my tongue could scarcely cry/ Weep! Weep! Weep! Weep!” (Line 2-3). Children often do not understand the cruelty of the world but maturity and growth they come to understand the meaning of their lives and the demonic and corrupted world of adults. They mourn over their state of being “cursed” and the shadow of experience never ceases to haunt their conscious mind. ‘Clothed in clothes of death’ they blame their parents to have sent them to hell, but the innocent child does not realize that and instead encourages himself and his friend that in their afterlives, they will be happy. The children are forced to live a life they do not want to live, a life that is good as offering oneself to death; such is the influence of the adult corruption on innocent and weak

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