The Chimney Sweeper - William Blake

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Blake

Biography

[From The Norton Poetry Workshop CD-ROM, edited by James F. Knapp]

 

 

The Early Years

 

William Blake was born in London in 1757. He came from a middle-class family of London shopkeepers: his father and one brother were hosiers; another brother was apprenticed to a gingerbread baker but ran away to become a soldier. When Blake was ten years old, he went to drawing school; when he was fourteen, he began his seven-year apprenticeship as an engraver. At age twenty-one, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts. He supplemented his formal training with a study of sixteenth-century prints; some of these came from his own collection, which he began forming in his teens with money supplied by his father. During that same period, he showed an interest in poetry; his first book was made up of poems written between the ages of twelve and twenty. His friends were invariably impressed with the range of his reading. He studied the Bible and the major works of literature, especially Milton; he read widely in philosophy, theology, and art theory and concerned himself deeply with the revolutionary effects of his time and their causes and effects.

 

 

Marriage

 

When he was twenty-four, Blake married Catherine Boucher. He taught her to read and how to help him with his engraving and printing. In the early and somewhat sentimentalized biographies of Blake, Catherine is represented as an ideal wife for an unorthodox and impecunious genius. Blake, however, must have been a trying domestic partner, and his venomous attacks on the torment caused by a possessive, jealous female will, which reached their height in 1793 and remained prominent in his writings for another decade, probably reflect a troubled period at home. The couple was childless.

 

 

Artistic Struggle (see "Blake's Craft and Legacy")

 

The Blakes for a time enjoyed moderate prosperity while Blake gave drawing lessons, illustrated books, and engraved designs made by other artists. When the demand for his work slackened, the Blakes moved, in 1800, to a cottage at Felpham, on the Sussex seacoast. There they lived under the patronage of the wealthy poetaster, biographer, and amateur of the arts William Hayley, who tried to transform Blake into a conventional artist and breadwinner. Blake rebelled, describing Hayley as "the Enemy of my Spiritual Life."

 

An event at Felpham in 1803 left a permanent mark on Blake's mind and art. He had an altercation with John Schofield, a private in the Royal Dragoons. Blake ordered Schofield out of his garden, and, when the soldier replied with threats and curses against Blake and his wife, Blake pushed him the fifty yards to the inn at which he was staying. Schofield brought charges that Blake had uttered seditious statements about King and country—a hanging offense, because England was at war with France. Blake was acquitted; nevertheless, Schofield, his fellow soldier Cock, and other participants in the trial haunted Blake's imagination and were enlarged to the demonic characters who play a sinister role in Jerusalem. The event exacerbated Blake's sense that ominous forces were at work in the contemporary world and led him to complicate the symbolic obliquities by which he veiled the unorthodoxy of his religious and moral opinions, as well as the radicalism of the many allusions to contemporary affairs that he worked into his poems.

 

After three years at Felpham, Blake moved back to London, determined to follow his "Divine Vision," though it meant a life of isolation, misunderstanding, and poverty. When his single great bid for public recognition, a one-man show, failed in 1809, Blake passed into almost complete obscurity. only when he was in his sixties did he finally attract a small but devoted group of young painters who served as an audience for his work and his talk. He experienced a serene and self-confident old age, largely free of the irascibility that had earlier arisen in response to the shallowness of the English public. He died in 1827.

 

http://www.wwnorton.com/introlit/poetry_blake5.htm

 

 

 

 

 

William Blake

 

“Songs of Innocence”: The Chimney Sweeper

 

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, and in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved; 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, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! --
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.
And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and 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 and 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, and never want joy.
And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

 

 

  

“Songs of Experience”: London

 

 

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

 

 

 

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Chocolate industry criticized over child labor

The Monterey County Herald, Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005

 

 

Before you pop that Valentine chocolate in your mouth,

consider whether it could have been produced by child slaves,

lawmakers said Monday in admonishing the chocolate industry

for its pace in monitoring labor practices on West African cocoa farms.

 

"If we can have our tuna fish dolphin-free,

we can have our chocolate slave-free,"

Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said at a news conference

where he pledged to abstain from chocolate

and refrain from buying Valentine's Day chocolate

for his wife and daughter.

 

A can of tuna fish as the ultimate guilt-free gift for one's valentine?

 

Engel and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa,

who in 2001 helped negotiate an industrywide protocol

on child labor practices,

said industry representatives told the lawmakers

they would miss a July 1 deadline for certification that

children were not being exploited on cocoa-growing farms.