William Blake - "The Chimney Sweeper" and "The Laughing Song" - Analysis

 Originating from Western Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, Romanticism, has had an enormous and undeniable effect on the realms of Art and Literature. Romanticism was at its core, a revolution against the changing world. As everything morphed around the Romantics, with Industrialism and Urbanization becoming the norm, they held their pens and brushes and opposed this materialistic new way of life. They considered Imagination better than reason, nature pure and the city dirty. They emphasized emotion and intuition over logic and technology, and sympathized with the human beings that were being replaced with cold, lifeless machines. They were emotional, creative, irrational and they attempted to free the human race from civilization, which they believed, made us all sick. Many of the characteristics of this humanitarian movement are displayed in poems such  as “The Chimney Sweeper” and  “The Laughing Song“ by William Blake, who was only recognized as a poet worthy of the name, posthumously.

In “The Chimney Sweeper” ,   Blake talks about the children whom poverty has forced into  a life of labor. The poet speaks from the persona of a child whose mother had passed and father had sold before he could even speak. He was, henceforth, sentenced to descend into the narrow and dark chimneys of England, to clean them. Working hard only to sleep in filth.  The child tells of one of the other children, named Tom Dacre,  who cried when he was forced to cut his white curly hair. He asks him to quiet down because at least now, his beautiful hair will be spared the dirtiness of their intoxicating job. Tom Dacre falls asleep and dreams of all the other children, sealed in black coffins. An angel appears and with a special key, lets all the children out of their grim confinements. The children enjoy their freedom, while running through green plains and laughing under a bright sun. They wash away the soot in a river, and leave their bags behind and climb up clouds and fly with the wind. The angel approaches Tom and reveals to him how to earn God’s protection and His gift of everlasting happiness: Being A Good Person. The dream ends and the children wake up in the early morning to get back to work. But something was different about Tom Dacre. Though the air was cold, he was warm and he knew that as long as he was a good boy, no one could hurt him, for God is salvation.

“The Laughing Song”, is a simpler poem. It depicts a scene in nature where all is good and  pure and everyone is happy.  The woods, the stream, the air, all of nature seems to be laughing. Even children seem to be in this merry piece of nature, and they too are gleeful and laughing. Even the colorful birds laugh in the sky, and the poet beckons the reader to join them in their pic-nic.  The poet invites the reader to a life of joy  amongst the woods where everyone sings: “Ha Ha He”.

 “The Chimney Sweeper” opens with a jab at the cruel urban society,  that sells children as if they weren’t human beings and puts them to work. Essentially robbing them of their childhoods:

“And my father sold me while yet my tongue ,

Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.

So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.”

The Industrial Revolution lead the way for Urbanization which caused the split of the English society into two distinct classes: The Poor, and The Rich. To the Romantics this was proof of the value of Pastoral life, seeing as Urban life has dehumanized so many. They felt compassion towards the common man and cared especially  about the children who were considered the spirit of innocence and the wisest of all. The poet is showing  how urbanization has stopped children from being children. In a sense, he’s saying that Urban Life is the death of innocence. The Romantics were bothered by the horrible conditions children and women were doomed to face because of poverty. Just like Tom Dacre, many children were forced down tight, cold tunnels, away from the sun and fresh air, to clean the soot from the chimneys of the people who could afford them. They were unhealthy and some died after getting stuck in someone’s chimney. Child labor laws were not yet  conceived and so the children suffered.

Another key characteristic of Romanticism is Imagination. In this poem,  Tom Dacre has a dream that delivers a great divine message.  To the Romantics, Imagination was the path to truth. In his dream, Tom sees the other chimney sweepers in black coffins. Presumably, they are dead. Then an angel comes, holding a key that frees all these tortured souls. After the children wash themselves and fly off to heaven, the angel tells Tom the secret to Salvation. Put simply, children, which urban life has killed, are so pure that they are sure to ascend to heaven. The black coffins symbolize our world, the world of greed and the material. The key is death. Death has liberated them from their glum lives. The angel is the angel of death or a representative of God. The children are free in what seems to be natural scenery, reflecting  Wordsworth’s belief that God resides in nature. Heaven is after all, a garden. They wash away the ugliness of our filthy world and can now finally go to the garden of Eden.

It’s  like when Tom cut his white hair and the other child tells him that now it won’t get dirty:

“Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head’s bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

His white hair is gone and has been spared the bleak harshness of this reality. Or, the image could just as well be a symbolization of Dacre’s loss of innocence. His “white” hair is now forever gone.

We here have a contrast of black and white, for Dacre’s hair, or his innocence, is white, while the coffins of the children are black. When white becomes black, innocence is spoiled and so urban life’s coldness besmirched the children’s pure souls.

This dream could also have a second meaning where the coffins stand for the city. Upon their return to nature, and their liberation from the horrendous city, they can finally be happy between green plains and a bright sun. The angel would again, be God, because God resides in nature and nature is the word of God.

The Angel’s message to Tom is a typical Christian message. Be good. Only by being good can the hardships of life be followed by the bliss of heaven. Although the Romantics didn’t believe in systematic religion, and preferred to adore God through his creation, man being one of them, hence the importance they adorn to  human beings, exceptions existed and Blake was an Orthodox Christian.

At the end, Tom wakes up from  his fantasy and he has to go to work. But now he had new hope, that things will be better for him. If not in this life, then in the next. Intuition is emphasized here. Tom is warm despite the cold, because he feels as if things will be good. His intuition is telling him not to worry. The Romantics idealized feelings and intuition almost as much as they did children. Children are the wisest of us all which is why a child is the one receiving a holy message from God.

And finally, there is the individualism, which is prominent here since the story is focusing on a single character going through a personal experience. It’s Tom Dacre who is the hero of the story, Tom Dacre who has the sacred dream,  Tom Dacre who arrives to the religious conclusion and Tom Dacre who gets a happy ending.

“The Laughing Song” focuses more on the nature loving side of Romanticism. All is happy in nature, because Nature is truth and cleanliness and the whereabouts of God. By being in nature you are with God and by admiring nature, you worship God. And of course, wherever God is, bliss is. Blake personifies elements of nature in order to get his point across:

“When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy.”

See, even the trees are happy !  This is another attempt to convince the reader of the wholesomeness of pastoral life, and the benefits of all that is natural:

“Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread.”

This poem brings up the image of a nice quiet morning spent in a forest or such, eating fresh fruits and basking in the fresh air. Basically, he is trying to seduce the reader into loving nature as much as he does.

Children are there as well, and they are happy. Looking back at “The Chimney Sweeper”, we see a comparison. The children of the city are miserable, mistreated and dying, while the children of the country are happy and gleeful with laughter never leaving their mouths:

“When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha, ha he!’”

After showing off all the happiness and glee and seeming perfection of nature, the poet asks the reader to come join him as if asking people to leave their enslavement to the city and go back to pastoral life which was clean and good:

“Come live, and be merry, and join with me,

To sing the sweet chorus of: ‘Ha, ha he!’”

The poet says “come live” as if a life in the city is no life at all.

The Romantics considered nature to be the realm of God and the city to be evil and enslaving. They cared about the well-being of people too much to condone the advancement of technology and the cold, soulless machines that came with it. In conclusion, they wanted what was best for mankind, and they saw the best in pastoral life which is why they urge our species to go back to its roots in poems such as these.  Willaim Blake exhibits the Romantic spirit perfectly and his works are proof of both  his belonging to this movement and his credit as a great poet.

-Mada El-Horr