“The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Experience is a contrast to “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Innocence. In this version, Blake has taken on the persona of the chimney sweeper, and the chimney sweeper has been influenced by society. He has realised the faults of society that he had never noticed before. It still shows the children making the best out of life, but this time the chimney sweeper is questioning this, saying “Because I was happy upon the heath,” that “They clothed me in the clothes of death”. Blake is implying that because the children are happy doing these jobs, that the adults think this is doing them no harm. Religion plays a part in this poem, as it is mentioned a lot in the poem itself, saying his mother and father have “gone up to the church to pray” and “are gone to praise the God & his Priest & King”. Blake is conveying a message that it is hypocrisy; the mother and father in the poem are good religious people, but even so they are still exploiting the children.
Another poem where Blake writes about children is “The School Boy (Songs of Innocence and Experience)”. In this poem, Blake has written it to persuade the reader that children should not go to school, and uses phrases like “O it drives all joy away!” and “The little ones spend their day/In sighing and dismay”. Blake is trying to make the reader agree that there is something wrong with society, and that they are doing wrong by making innocent children go to school, when they should be free. At the start of the poem, Blake represents the schoolboy as a skylark (“And the skylark sings with me”). A skylark is associated with the morning and therefore connected to the children, and then connected to the boy himself. The skylark only sings in the sky, and the skylark is often used as a nickname for someone who is doing well, and this is why Blake used this particular bird to represent the schoolboy. Later in the poem, Blake refers to the schoolboy as a flower bud, using a metaphor to say the schoolboy is beautiful and should be free.
In “The School Boy”, Blake uses a contrast of positive and negative words next to each other to create an oxymoron. He uses phrases like “blossoms blow away” and “the tender plants are stripped” to highlight the fact that the schoolboy cannot experience the freedom as it has been taken away from him. The positive words are “blossoms”, “tender” and “plants”, but the contrast is used by adding words like “blow away” and “stripped”.
“The School Boy” is similar to both “The Chimney Sweeper” poems, as Blake is attacking the way people were treating children. Blake believed that children should be free, otherwise “The little ones spend their day/In sighing and dismay”, and that they should not have to work or go to school (“But to go to school in a summer morn,-/Oh it drives all joy away!”) but to enjoy freedom and innocence.
Blake refers to children in “London (Songs of Experience)”. In the first two stanzas, Blake uses repetition and alliteration to create a mournful atmosphere. In the first stanza he uses words like “wander”, “weakness” and “woe”. This creates the scene of London; making it seem depressing and slow. In the second stanza, Blake repeats the phrase “In every” to draw attention to the points he is making, that nobody is happy and everyone is fearful.
In the third stanza, Blake brings in religion, which is also clear in “The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Experience)”. Again, he is attacking religion, describing the church as “black’ning”. He also refers to the chimney sweeper, saying “How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry”, which is very similar to “The Chimney Sweeper” and also shows he does not agree with it, by saying the children are crying. Blake says even infants are upset, with “the new-born Infant’s tear”. Blake makes the reader feel sorry for the children, by describing them crying, and using words like “youthful” and “new-born”, which makes them sound naïve and innocent, and this makes the reader agree that they shouldn’t be made to feel fear or be upset.
Blake also makes the reader empathise with the children and infants in “Infant Joy (Songs of Innocence)”. “Infant Joy” represents an innocent baby, who has come into a world where everything is expected to be joyful and well. It is as if Blake has adopted the persona of a mother or father, writing about how the child has come into the world. Blake is saying that all babies are happy, by using phrases like “I happy am” and “Joy is my name”. He is implying the baby is joy and expects joy. The reader immediately warms to the infant, because at the time people believed babies to be sinful, but Blake wrote about them as innocent. Blake believed children only did wrong because of the effects on society, and the baby in “Infant Joy” is represented as not yet part of society as it has no name (“Joy is my name”). Blake also describes how the baby is not only happy himself, but also brings joy to others around him, by saying “Thou dost smile”. This is one poem where Blake writes about a child or an infant being happy, innocent and free, as most of the others describe children as being trapped or upset.
“Infant Sorrow (Songs of Experience)” is another example of a poem like this. It is a complete contrast to “Infant Joy” and it is not seen from a real baby’s point of view, so it is not a joyful or naïve outlook on life, but it shows a more real view from the baby that is wise. The baby has been brought into a world of suffering, not joy. This world does not welcome the baby, but Blake describes how “My mother groan’d! my father wept./Into the dangerous world I leapt”. Both stanzas in the poem use a lot of plosives, like “piping” and “bound”, which makes the poem sound abrupt, and makes the reader more shocked. The phrase “Like a fiend hid in a cloud”, makes the baby sound like a devil in the thundercloud, and that the baby is seen as threatening and unwanted by the family. The reader automatically sympathises with the baby and the way the baby has been welcomed into the world.
Many of Blake’s poems highlight the treatment of the children, and I think the poems that best achieve this are the ones Blake wrote for Songs of Experience, as these are usually cynical views that draw the reader’s attention and makes the agree with Blake.
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