How Blake Criticized the Church by Writing a Poem

William Blake, born in 1757, was a poet and a visual artist. (Strooper) He wanted his poems to contain intellectual meaning (the dictionary one) and he shared his ideas that fittest the Romanticist mentality from the 19th century. These ideas are also shown in his poem about a chimney sweeper (Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake). The Chimney Sweeper consists of two poems, and they are part of the collection Songs of Innocence and Experience from 1794, which appeared in two phases. By reading these poems, it becomes clear why William Blake added them to this collection in particular. (Book)The first poem, from Songs of Innocence, tells the story of a young chimney sweeper called Tom Dacre. It shows the suffering of a young, innocent child, who was sold as a chimney sweeper. During the night, Tom dreams about an angel with a “bright key”, who frees “thousands of sweepers”.

The angel told Tom he should be a good boy, and then he would also be freed, just like the other sweepers. (poem). The key of the angel represents the speaker’s faith in being rewarded for working as a chimney sweeper, which is a representation of innocence. (Langham, K. )This angel, however, is absent in the second poem, from Songs of Experience. In this poem, the speaker is a more experienced child, who has been working much longer. The child is wearing black clothes, “the clothes of death”, which his parents had given him. They also taught him “to sing the notes of woe”. This could be the child’s way of making clear that his parents brought him distress and pain, since they taught him these notes of woe. His parents are worshipping “God and his Priest and King”, but they abandoned their own son. (poem)Like many Romanticists, Blake also glorifies the innocence of the child. He, however, claims that worldly experiences are good for children. The innocence of the child in the first poem, turns into experience in the second poem: the child now knows that the secular powers and the English church are trying to mislead the people by saying that all their hard work will be rewarded in the end, to compensate for their extreme suffering. In the first poem, Blake represents the idea of freedom given by the angel as a dream, instead of something that can actually be achieved for these chimney sweepers. Although Tom also may unconsciously have his doubts about this salvation, he still believes, that he and his fellow sweepers will be freed. This delusion makes their pain a bit more bearable.

The fact that this was only a dream, and no real evidence, causes the speaker’s perspective to change from innocent to experienced. He now knows that his obedience will not bring him divine freedom, and he understands that the church is responsible for keeping him in bondage. His parents’ relationship with the church even caused them to turn away from him. Blake wants to show his readers that these children now understand the reality of how the corrupt English church treats them. By writing The Chimney Sweeper, Blake criticized the way the church uses children for human bondage and forces people to think that their distress will be rewarded by receiving freedom in the end. Even in the name of Christ, the situation of these children can never be justified.