Homework Question on Chimney Sweeper and The Nurse’s Song
Please choose 2 poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience to make a comparison.
Homework Answer on Chimney Sweeper and The Nurse’s Song
William Bleakes songs of innocence represent the innocence and the joyful world of children while his songs of Experience represent the adult world that is characterized by regression and corruption. These poems are usually in pairs to allow the audience to compare the view of a child and that of an adult regarding a particular situation. Thus the poems trace the transformation from childhood to adulthood and the associated change in behavior.
The poem Chimney Sweeper is a song of innocence about a little boy who has been abandoned by his parents and engages in dangerous works of cleaning chimneys. The first two lines insinuate that the first speaker observes a black day in the snow which indicates that the black thing is a boy as only boys clean chimney in this time and that the speaker looks down upon the boy and does not view as him as a person. In the third and fourth lines the speaker asks where the boy’s parents were and the boy replies that they had gone to church. The two lines rhyme perfectly with the word say and pray.
Lines five to eight includes the boy informing the audience about his life’s story. He tells of how he was happy and had a lot of fun in his younger days until his parents rest him in cloths of death. This metaphor implies that may have compelled him to work so as to make him grow up. The cloths of death which are black and covered in soot may represent dangerous work that may lead to death that the young boy is employed in.This indicates that his parents taught him to sing the notes of woe.