Interpretations of William Blake’s Canticles

Below is a college essay I had to write on William Blake’s wonderful poetry that I would like to share with all of you.

William Blake has a common theme within his poems of the two Chimney Sweeper poems in the Songs of Innocence and Experience and the Human Abstract. The common theme within these dark poems is a message of the cruelty of society and how that society associates innocence with immaturity. Society then uses a child’s innocence against said child for exploitation and covers it up with their own false virtues. In order to understand this reasoning, one needs to understand a little about William Blake’s past.

William Blake was born in London in 1757. He developed such skills as painting and engraving which he did after his education at the Royal Academy School (www.biography.com). He was most noted as a mystic for his radical and political beliefs. What influenced the creation of the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” were the experiences maturing in society and the fall of London in the war between England and France. Blake was continually disgusted with the decline of society. The despairing poverty he had to witness attributed to him having such radical political and religious beliefs (Greensill). “Blake’s preoccupation with good and evil as well as his strong philosophical and religious beliefs remained throughout his life and he never stopped depicting them in his poetry and engravings” (Greensill). Blake died in 1827 leaving nothing to his name except his works (Greensill). Blake’s good upbringing to his transition to witnessing the continual barbarism of society created for Blake a despair which could be followed in the common theme between the two “Chimney Sweeper” poems and definitely in the “Human Abstract”.

The poem “Chimney Sweeper” has a certain duality to it. The first poem is sweet and sentimental with Tom Dacre seeing an angel come and telling him to “be a good boy” (Shannon) and he will “never want joy” (Shannon) in heaven. The poem is pleasant and dark. The pleasantness of the poem comes from a happy ending, going to heaven after dying from black lung. Even though the child was orphaned and sent into slavery, he can look forward to happiness in death (Shannon). The darkness comes from its bleak imagery of the chimney sweeper’s existence. A sordid reality is first hinted in the poem by the first stanza when the child’s mother died and the father sold him into slavery to be a chimney sweeper. Darkness is further emphasized with the child’s name Tom Dacre which loosely translates to Tom Dark (Blake 12). Darker still is an angel that tells Tom Dacre that an escape to true happiness awaits him in death (Shannon). The angel in the poem could be representing religion. The poem might be saying that religion is being used to fool the child in his innocence as a measure to keep him enslaved. Being one of the songs of innocence, the chimney sweeper is an innocent child taken advantage of by cruel society. It is a lamentation, where innocence is normally associated with being naïve and immature (Beer 54–55). It becomes the justification for society to exploit the child.

The second part of this duality comes in the second poem on the “Chimney Sweeper” in the “Songs of Experience”. This counter part to the first poem paints a harsher reality of life which stems from Blake’s bitter disillusion with society and its faith (Beer 54). The chimney sweeper in this poem is not overtaken by misery, unlike the first poem where the child is promised salvation in death. He still tells the story of being exploited, except on the experience side of it. There is no divine salvation to save him, and his parents feel they did nothing wrong in selling him to slavery. They insist he is not subdued by his fate. They go to the Church that represents society’s religion which condones this act of cruelty. The child says all this amalgamates the heaven of every child’s misery (Blake 37). The child knows there is no salvation waiting for him and is not taken in by the false doctrine of his parents’ religion. This duality between innocence and experience can be seen as a transition in the chimney sweeper from a state of naïveté to a state of experience knowing of the real cruelty of his plight.

When it comes to describing society’s cruelty, the “Human Abstract” describes it in full. The poem elucidates that false virtues stem from selfishness, fear, and ignorance (Blake 47). Society has pity and mercy from the existence of the poor and the unhappy. Society has humility only out of “holy fears” (Shannon). In the poem, religion is described as the “Tree of Mystery” (Blake 47). The word mystery evokes an image of society believing something out of ignorance of the world. Tree means religion branches out and pervades all areas of the human mind filling it with fear and false hope. False virtues spring forth from religion and start bringing forth cruelty. The experience of the cruelty in society with its devices causes the human mind to grow knowing cruelty and its devices (Blake 47). It creates an atmosphere of fear, while perpetuating its cruelty.

The two poems “Human Abstract” and the second “Chimney Sweeper” show the “more realistic, cynical and aware of the pessimistic aspects of life” (www.poetseers.org). The “Chimney Sweeper” in the “Songs of Innocence” describes the awareness of harsh realities and confidence in the divine. “Innocence and Experience are contrary states, ways of seeing and dwelling in the world” (Gourlay). Those who are in innocence believe in the redeeming qualities of the divine. The divine is sympathetic to human plight. Experience teaches that the divine can be inhuman and cruel (Gourlay). Experience is truer to life than the ideal of Innocence. Society looks at innocence as an opportunity to exploit unfortunate people and in the process perverts the beauty and the divine nature of innocence. Innocence turns into Experience and becomes a perverse reality. Children are forced to grow out of their innocence by society through their cruelty. Society believes its act of cruelty is an act of some holy virtue to justify abusing their children. In these poems, such cruelty is expressed. It is unfortunately a part of human experience.

The Chimney Sweeper

(Songs of Experience)

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother! say!
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

The Chimney Sweeper

(Songs of Innocence)

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “ ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl’d like a lamb’s back. was shav’d: so I said
“Hush. Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

And so he was quiet & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack.
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black.

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark.
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

The Human Abstract

(Songs of Experience)

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Catterpiller and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.

Works Cited

Beer, John. Blake’s Visionary Universe. Manchester: The University of Manchester at the University Press, 1969. 54–55.

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and of Experiance : Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789–1794 / with an Introduction and Commentary by Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Orion P, 1967.

“Blake, William (1757–1827).” The Biography Channel. 1 Aug. 2006 <http://www.biography.com>.

Gourlay, Alexander S. “An Emergency Online Glossary of Terms, Names, and Concepts in Blake”. The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 1 August 2006 <http://www.blakearchive.org/>.

Greensill, Emma, Kate Handy, and Philip Nixon. “William Blake.” The Grotesque. 1 Aug. 2006 <http://www.german.leeds.ac.uk>.

Shannon, Leah. “William Blake 1757–1827.” Arkansas School of Mathematics and Sciences. 1 Aug. 2006 <http://asms.k12.ar.us>.

“Songs of Experience — William Blake.” Poet Seers. 1 Aug. 2006 <http://www.poetseers.org>.