The second stanza then goes on to describe another chimney sweeper called Tom Dacre, a child who is crying because his hair has just been shaved off, the other child comforts Tom, telling him that his hair colour will no longer be spoiled by the soot. The description “That curl’d like a lamb’s back” tells us that the children are treated like farm animals, and have no say in their life. Picking a lamb as the animal also a reference to the lamb of god and innocence, a theme reflected thought Songs of Innocence.
The third stanza shows us the chilling reminder of the times with Tom Dacre’s Dream, it describes how other sleepers are lying dead in coffins. The coffins however are referred to as black coffins. This could refer to the amount of children that died inside the chimneys that they where trying to clean and that the chimney’s are their graves. In the third line the dead children are given generalised names, while this could be to try and personalise the children, or it could be referring to the fact that these children are just faceless people.
The fourth stanza then continues with Tom’s dream, describing an angel who comes to release these children and let them run and play in fields.
This is more cheerful, words such as ‘leaping’ and ‘laughing’ have the effect of making pervious stanzas seen more sombre in contrast.
The fourth line heightens the contrast, the fact that this is a dream emphasises the said truth that they would be unlikely ever to “wash in the river” and “shine in the sun” us their real existence
The fifth stanza finishes the dream, describing the children’s ascension into heaven. The description of ‘naked and white’ is quite a contrast to the darkness and black in the first three stanzas, therefore it is probably a reference to the children’s souls instead of their black bodies, again this is a theme seen in other poems in Songs Of Innocence.
At the end of the stanza the angel tells Tom that if he is good then he would have god of his father. This can be considered in two different ways. The first possibility is that Blake is stating no matter how bad life gets, no matter how bad the church is, in the after life you will be with god, and the children are celebrating this. The other possibility is that this belief is a con from the church and the society of that time to make the children accept their lives as slaves.
The sixth stanza now describes Tom waking up and him and the other children going back to work. The theory that the children have been conditioned is backed up with the comparison of what the morning was like, cold, while Tom is happy and warm.
The last line is contradictory and shows the innocence of the children that has been abused by society, as all sweepers do their jobs, but many end up dead, deformed or dying of lung cancer and other lung diseases.
The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Experience, is made up of three stanzas. The first stanza contains a rhyming couplet (aabb) while the rhyming style of the other two stanzas is abab.
The first stanza starts off very dark by describing the chimney sweeper has a ‘little black thing’ complete removing any personalisation of the sweeper. Blake contrasts the child with the white snow, perhaps to show the purity and innocence of the child that has been taken away.
Again as with the Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Innocence the sweeper is so young that he cannot pronounce the traditional cry of the sweepers.
The narrator then asks the child where his parents are, and the child simply replies that they have ‘gone up to the church to pray’. This is a bad reflection of the times where parents left the children out in the snow while they went to church.
In the second stanza the child tells us that when he was younger and happy that his parents sold him away to be a chimney sweeper.
The stanza changes very quickly from a positive outlook with word like ‘happy’ and ‘smil’d’ to really dark works like ‘death’ and ‘woe’. This is almost as if the child is remembering happy time but quickly snaps back the present and the dreadful place that he is in. The fact that the child describes his clothes as ‘clothes of death’ is a very dark image. Not only is his clothes black from the soot, black being the colour of mourning, it is almost seems as if the child knows that these clothes will be the clothes the child dies in.
The third stanza describes how the child’s parents still refuse to believe that they have done wrong, just because the child hides his misery by being happy and dancing and singing. The parents are so naive that they don’t even think their child is being done any harm, condemning him to an early grave.
The child then attacks the church for treating him like they have. Showing how even God, Priest and King are forcing him to conceal his own unhappiness.
The final line even goes to the point of saying that Religion makes a heaven out of people misery, a really negative view about the church.
While both poems refer to a young child who has been sold to be a chimney sweeper, any other comparison stops there. The Poem from Songs of Experience is far darker than its counterpart.
While the Songs of Innocence show how the innocence of a child has been abused to make him accept his short and unhappy life, the second poem shows the hatred of a child forced into poverty.