when we are born we crawl out of a dark tunnel and leap into the light but what if this birth is a leap into a dark suffocating tunnel again in Mary Poppins we hear a Chimney Sweeper describing his life on the rooftops of London the harsh conditions of child labor got attention long back in the 18th century when two romantic preoccupations childhood and Industrial Revolution were put side by side in a Blake Bleak mode to Target the established church and uncaring parents today we will catch the Romantic inaction in William Blake's contrary perspectives the parallel Masterpiece is on foreign although usually in my videos I always begin with a short biography of the poet and the context in which a poem is written in case of this pair of poems since we have already covered William Blake in great detail in my previous videos I would strongly advise you to go and have a look because there I have talked about the most important aspects of William Blake why is he according to me the first of the Romantics What new things he brought in and there we had discussed in details about his idea of contrarity but to give you a gist of the matter I can tell you this that William Blake had this idea that this entire reality uh was a set of contraries put together without Contour is no progression that was his idea and in 1789 he came up with a book it was not the usual printed book that he came up with he engraved this book and he was also a great artist because he etched out those drawings too on those plates he came up with this book called The Songs of Innocence and here he primarily deals with the life of children and the innocent way of looking at things where human soul is not corrupted by what he later calls experience a few years later songs of experience comes out and there he shows how this innocence is corrupted is challenged by and it's somehow modified to a great extent by experience so it's not just a contrary state of you know good or evil he doesn't call innocence God and experience evil he rather says that these two are uh complementary aspects of existence and he also talks about symmetry especially in his poem on the tiger now since these two book Songs of Innocence and songs of experience they are considered to be parallel books because he clearly published them together again saying that these are the contrary states of the human soul we do find parallel poems in them like often even with the same title or very similar title today's video is going to talk about one specific pair of poems with the same title but completely different perspectives so first we will take up the Chimney Sweeper from the Songs of Innocence and then we will take up the Chimney Sweeper from the songs of experience so if you have any one of them in your syllabus it is very very strongly recommended that you study both these poems because they kind of provide a wholesome perspective when it comes to this one area so you can say Chimney Sweeper poems are on the same topic but they offer different perspectives when we come to the first poem that is Chimney Sweeper from the Songs of Innocence we notice that the speaker is a child which is normally the case with most of the poems in Songs of Innocence because it's like innocent person is singing something so this has a song like quality to it and let's see what this child is telling us 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 are sweep and in suit I sleep hold on a second if you have read the poem The Lamb uh you have this idea that Songs of Innocence is about these happy valleys where everybody is free and happy and there is no fear but this poem which belongs to the Songs of Innocence begins with description of a very Bleak situation this child's mother is dead and this child is sold by his father to someone and he works as a child labor so why does Blake put this in Songs of Innocence at all because this is a very dark theme it seems too dark for sounds of Innocence or the flavor we find in Songs of Innocence perhaps because Blake wants to show us that external situation doesn't matter what matters is how you look at the situation he's talking about the perspective the point of view so we will look at the situation in which the child is which is a very Bleak one and we will also see how the child reacts to it that reaction shows innocence the situation is Not Innocent now let's break this up again 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 this child was sold at a very young age and then he says so your chimneys I sweep and in suit I sleep notice the pronoun your this child is speaking to us readers and therefore somehow he is saying that he sweeps our chimneys and that makes us somehow involved in this torture that he is facing so we cannot avoid the responsibility as a society okay there's little Tom Dicker now this child talks about a friend who is also a chimney sweep this little Tom Dicker who cried when his head that curled like a lamb's back was shaved so I said hashtom never mind it for when your heads bare you know that the suit cannot spoil your white hair so Tom Decker who comes here as a chimney sweep is first taken and his head is shaved off why because when a chimney sweep enters the chimney then if he has a lot of hair then that will be a problem what is interesting is he mentions the word Lamb's back so Tom's hair was Curly and whenever this word lamb is used in any of the poems by Blake we cannot Overlook it it has very strong resonances lamb is associated with Christ and therefore Tom's hair it connects him to the grace of Christ in a way so when his head is shaved off he loses that connection and at the same time I feel that you might also say uh we are reminded of Samson agonistus who was very powerful but uh his power lied in his hair so his wife knew that and his wife belonged to the opposite tribes and she wanted to defeat him and therefore she cut off his head while he was sleeping and that led to his defeat so that was Samson Stone anyway here the Shaving off of Tom Decker's hair it represents a kind of loss of course and not just loss of an object of beauty but it is loss of some kind of power the power of Innocence so it's like he was being initiated into adulthood before he was ready and he wanted to comfort Tom saying hush Tom never minded and is trying to show him that because of his shaved head his hair cannot get spoiled okay his hair doesn't exist anymore so the way he is consoling Tom shows the childlike innocence of the speaker so this is why this poem is in this book next comes a very disturbing thing to me and so he was quiet and that very night as Tom was asleeping he had such a sight so Tom had a dream that night what was that dream about the thousands of sweepers dig Joe Ned and Jack where all of them locked up in coffins of black now usually children are afraid of Darkness and they usually don't like things which are black normally so imagine the life of a chimney sweep who goes down the chimney every day to clean that dark suit and in the process gets completely darkened by the carbon deposits for him life is like a dark coffin and Tom dreams that all of them are locked up in coffin so while usually coffins enclosed dead people here coffins are enclosing the living children because their lives are like black death and by came an angel who had a bright key notice the word bright here and he opened the coffins and set them all free then down a green plane leaping laughing they run and wash in a river and shine in the Sun so this angel came unlocked them and they were all free and what were these children doing they were doing what children usually do they were running leaping laughing and they were washing themselves a rare privilege because they do not have much opportunity to clean themselves when they are chimney sweeping so this site which begins with coffins ends with something very bright then naked and white all their bags left behind they rise upon clouds and sport in the Wind these children are not wearing any clothes clothes represent social conventions because you see we wear clothes to make ourselves presentable in society and depending on your social status you dress yourselves right when these children are running naked then they are free from social oppressions social expectations and they are happy all their bags left behind bags burdens of life because these children are employed as unpaid laborers and they have to carry these heavy loads the moment they get these bags down they feel free and that moment comes only in dreams not in reality and the angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy he'd have God for his father and never want joy so you see a pastoral scene an idyllic nature the kind of nature which we find in the poems like the lamb or introduction to the Songs of Innocence the angel comes speaks to the children and speaks to Tom and says that if you are a good boy then God will be there for you and you will not need anything else this line may be seed in two ways you know first is his father had sold him and he is you can say in a way fatherless God will become his father and he will be very happy he will not require anything else to be joyful second and more sinister meaning is God will become your father and you will not want joy now they want joy now they feel that they are suffering and they need something else to be happy if you are obedient and good then you will not want to be happy and so Tom awoke and we Rose in the dark Rose in the dark again something is not right here right we We rise with the dawn but they are rising with the dark and got with our bags and our brushes to work so the burden is again put on their shoulders though the morning was go old Tom was happy and warm so if all do their Duty they need not fear harm harm will come but they will not be afraid because they are doing their Duty this poem is about obedience innocence is about obedience if you think about the story of Adam and Eve they were good when they were obedient when they transgressed they experienced that fruit of knowledge and they became disobedient so obedience will make you have an inexperienced life a survival life whereas experience will expand your perspective so what is Blake actually doing here is he praising innocence I would rather say he's questioning innocence Songs of Innocence is not just about celebrating in a sense it's also about understanding innocence why are we innocent and what do we do when we are innocent sometimes we are simply obedient and survival we do not ask questions we do not want things which are not given to us so although this poem belongs to the Songs of Innocence book it creates disturbing questions in a very subtle way it doesn't romanticize the life of the Chinese people and it shows the exploitation that a child has to bear now many of you are familiar with the exact work that a Chimney Sweeper did back then so before we go on to the songs of experience let me just give you a brief idea about the exact job description of a chimney sweep they are called both Chimney Sweeper and chimney sweep both are correct now back in the early days they didn't have Auto clean chimneys so in London or in major cities the houses had these long chimneys which had to be cleaned regularly then regulations came regarding the number of chimneys that a house can have and limitations started to be imposed specially after the Great Fire of London and then some intricate architectural connectors were made so that they ended up having less number of Chimney spouts but more rooms to which those spouts reached they were like those Plumbing tunnels now when somebody burnt wood in a chimney then of course carbon deposits piled up in those tunnels now the authorities said that you need to keep them clean to avoid any fire hazard but now that these chimneys were delicately connected with each other and sometimes these tunnels were very very narrow too narrow for a grown-up man to enter and clean that physically so they started to employ children children sometimes as young as four years old and parents they lied about the age of their children so that they could sell them as apprentices they used to call them apprentices like interns and while doing that job these children their bodies did not mature in a normal way they had deformities they often suffered from inflammation in the eyes and worse than anything else cancer nobody bothered much about it because they thought that well we have no alternative we need to light our fires and we need to clean our chimneys so children were continuously robbed of their childhood and no regulations were there to stop this until much later and Blake was writing this there were no regulations at all in songs of experience version you get a more latent account a little black thing in the snow crying weep weep in notes of Woe who is speaking not a child some Observer who looks at a child's body in the snow and can hear the sound that the child is making the weep weep sound and he calls him a little black thing now in the first poem where we have seen that the child was sold by the father we have already seen the dehumanization of the child and that is Ray enforced here in this expression little black thing so this child has become an object where are thy father and mother say they are both gone up to the church to pray so this man presumably a man goes to this child and asks about his parents in the first poem the mother was dead and somehow we feel that mothers are more caring and okay since the mother was dead it was natural for the father to sell the child because fathers love their children less than mothers this is the usual idea of people here both the parents are alive and they have gone to the charge to pray leaving this child in the snow so usually the presence of the father and especially the mother is a protective presence but even when they are alive they have abandoned the child because I was happy upon the Heat and smiled among the winter snow they clothed me in the clothes of death and taught me to sing the notes of Woe that clothed imagery we had in case of Songs of Innocence Chimney Sweeper that they were naked which means that getting rid of the clothes means getting rid of social obligations social conditions here he is saying that he is clothed in the clothes of death so his parents have only introduced him to death not life and they have taught him to sing the notes of suffering notes of Woe so what is the duty of a parent to provide protection to support a child to clothe him for warmth but here they are clothing him to work almost in a coffin because a tunnel of the chimney is like a coffin and because I am happy and dance and sing so he was happy and then his parents decided to make him unhappy and now even then he is trying to show a happy face because that's what children do they can't continue to be melancholic so even when they are chimney sweeping if you have three four five children working together maybe at the end of their work day they play together and they laugh and seeing that the parents think that okay these kids are fine so he says and because I'm happy and dance and sing they think they have done me no injury and are gone to praise God and His priest and King who make up a heaven of our misery so God here is not the universal God our Father in Heaven God belongs to a certain class of people and the priests and the church they belong to this specific God who has no benevolence at all who gives no guidance who gives no Grace and they are forming a very sinful Trinity you know what a trinity is in Christian belief system they have this idea of father that is the real God the son who was born as Jesus Christ and Holy Ghost something like a spirit and they form this Holy Trinity here we have a different kind of Trinity God priest king and we don't know about God but so far as priest and King is concerned they were ruthlessly oppressive to people so if they belong to God then of course this God this version of God is again ruthlessly oppressive because this God doesn't do anything to alleviate the sorrow the misery of these children so how is this poem different from the first poem first is you have uh no friends here this child appears to be much isolated although he dance and sings we know that it's a pretense whereas in the first poem we see this child comforting Tom Dicker and there's a friendship which they shared that's why Tom shares his vision with him and somehow they console each other so they managed to go on but here this child knows the reality and sometimes with knowledge comes no happiness brother I would say with knowledge happiness can hardly come in this poem there is no hope for salvation there is no hope for redemption in the first poem there is hope that there would be an angel who would come and this Angel would say that if you are good God will be there for you we have naked children enjoying themselves in the first poem although in a dream but still there is a way to escape here no Escape is there anymore because the experience is too much somehow when I see this expression I have an of our misery I'm reminded of this poem Jerusalem where Blake talks about dark satanic Mills which are these orthodox churches of England and he says and was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic Mills so he is calling churches Mills of Satan because these churches provide no light but Darkness while talking about William Blake earlier in the other video I was referring to I mentioned his work marriage of Heaven and Hell and there is this first part called the argument where we have this person called rinthra you know Baden landscape a heat in that part Bleak attempts to show that what we commonly see as good is basically obedience as I was telling you earlier and he writes good is the passive that obeys reason evil is the active springing from energy good is heaven evil is hell so he does not make a value judgment here he rather tries to understand what are the things that make Society call somebody good when Society sees that a person conforms to its codes then the person is branded as a good person but how does that change the whole suffering of these chimney sweepers it does not these children are subjected to a kind of physical as well as spiritual slavery in the first poem the child still has some kind of a faith in the religious system the system where God comes and saves everybody but in the second poem we see that this child knows that it's all fake or rather organized religion is the form of Oppression God is something that is used by people to oppress other people but since it is William Blake no discussion is complete without actually looking at the at the poems as he painted them so in order to understand the essential difference between the two points I want you to look at these two plates set side by side first the first thing you would notice is that in the first poem You See bright colors orange red a little bit of brown while in the second it's all monochrome dark and maybe a little shade of gray and blue here and there which increases the Sinister effect which this plate conveys now Focus to the bottom part you would see there are these children who are enjoying themselves presumably they are not wearing anything no burdens with them no burdens of society no loads no bags and interestingly there is an Angelic form which is kind of uh holding the hand of this child probably picking him up from his coffin and they're all very happy so many trees which kind of become a continuous frame to the whole poem and these children are holding each other's hands even so we have these ideas of friendship of enjoyment and the color black although it is used in the soul plate it doesn't become the predominant shade because to an innocent child the reality is not what makes him go on his dreams makes him go on his dreams make him go on and his dreams are bright colored now come to the next one that is the songs of experience that you miss people there is no full grown tree here unlike the first plate you just have a few withered leaf-like things and when you zoom in on the child you would notice that there is some dark cloudy structure at which he is looking is carrying burden on the sack and it's probably snowing because you have these streaks of black passing down what really saddens me in this picture is the series of footprints you can notice around his feet which shows that other children have worked this way but unlike the first plate they are not walking with him so in suffering there is no companionship you suffer alone so this sense of loneliness when he's looking up at the sky he sees nothing there no promise of better days there is a house in the background with one window which is also very dark and his walk is slouched and his body doesn't show a lot of enthusiasm when he's walking it's looking kind of back and up and there is despair a long look at these plates often make us understand things which are not there in these words and I'm sure I missed a lot of things which if you look at these plates you might identify so I am really very eager to know what you feel about these pictures and what new things come to your mind it would be a great thing to discuss in comment section so when we talk about Blake people use expressions like he's a romantic Visionary you have read these two poems now do you really think is a Visionary Visionary somebody who is more of an idealist who is not in touch with exact immediate reality but if we see him talking actually about reality here hard reality and Romanticism was essentially at least in the beginning about two things one is the whole idea of childhood and the laws of natural world as an effect of Industrial Revolution and sadly when retail was becoming an industrial Powerhouse you know the world leader it was doing it at the cost of its own children because child labor was cheap unregulated easily available in 1817 a parliamentary committee was formed and they investigated the conditions of these chimney sweeps and they came up with these uh basic findings one is employers preferred smaller children because they could climb into those intricate structures girls as well as boys were used if they refused they were punished physically most of the time they were sold by their own parents and these parents as I told you often lied about the age of the children to make them sellable and I don't even have the numbers to share with you as to how many children were killed because of cancer Charles Lam in his essay the praise of chimney sweepers he uh talks about these children and says I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks poor blocks innocent blacknesses although I find I find these words a bit disturbing but at least people were talking and somehow social Consciousness grows out of these apparently romantic idealistic writings we often feel that what's the point you know writing about corruption writing about evils of society but I think that people will start giving some kind of attention to any social condition to any social oppression only when they repeatedly see people writing about them and not just writings you have representations through one of the most popular medium the cinema in Mary Poppins we have this Chimney Sweep although he's not a child but he has been through this whole experience so we see him dancing around with two children and they enter this house and there's a chimney the child the girl child looks up and she feels very scared and says it's gloomy and dark there he says it's Doorway to a place of Enchantment so what is he glamorizing this whole profession is not he's trying to portray that when you have nothing to fall back on it's only your imagination that can save you but that is not the case with the child who speaks in the book the songs of experience the practice was not abolished until 1875 nearly 50 years after Blake's death so in a nutshell we can say that these two poems are about the same social oppression that children face the difference is only in the perspective that the speaking child has while the first one offers a kind of Solace the second one proves that that Solace was a falsehood and thereby refutes the first poem all together the other places where the Blake writes about chimney sweepers are poems like London there also he paints a pretty bleak picture whenever little children are subjects of his poems in songs of experience we see a lot of questioning on the duty of parents and somehow God since God is considered to be the ultimate parent figure God is also problematized in the process the black color which gets on the skin of these boys is seen as evil not because black skin is evil he writes in this poem little black boy and he shows that black skin is a celebration of the land of the sun this Blackness is artificial imposed by Man by society and this Blackness is evil so while the Songs of Innocence yearns for washing off this Blackness yearns for a naked flight into this land of fantasy songs of experience shows that the sky above is darker than your skin there's no point flying up there especially when you need to clean the chimneys of the churches too how can you say the god Who belongs to the church is going to be a savior now all right so I'll see you again in my next video maybe in a less gloomy way literature is not always about entertainment it's also or rather it is more about introspection thank you all for being with me see you all again in my next video till then this is signing off bye I'll play the smoke is all pillaged twin pavement and stars is the chimney sweep world