this poem begins with the image of an orphaned child a child who is lost as mother and notice structurally we have stanzas of basically four lines so quat trains and that rhyming we have young and tongue weep and sleep so it's a a BB the structure of the poem is a fairly simple structure and this is a structure that Blake employed over and over again but the imagery that he starts off with of the orphaned child child immediately sets this tone for the story chimney sweepers in his day and age had a very very low job it was a job that was probably not very uh one that anybody would want um coal was the major burning product at the time and the entirety of London was blackened by coal soot coal would come up out of the fires burned in the in the stoves and in the ovens and in the the fireplaces of the city and Cole would would have these huge black clouds make these huge black clouds over the city and it would cake in the various chimneys and so you had to have somebody go and clean out the chimneys most of the time the men would be covered in soot they'd be they'd be filthy dirty they'd be up on the roofs which is very dangerous um they would often times be carrying a lot of gear and sometimes they couldn't get to certain places in the chimneys because the chimneys were very large and tall and so what they do is hire small boys uh and sometimes small girls but mostly small boys and they would tie them up and lower them down into the black of the chimney where they would clean the chimney down down below and it was very terrifying very claustrophobic job almost like being in a tomb not one to be uh pursued by anybody that could stay away from it but this in this story the child speaker the narrator says that when he was young his father sold him into being a chimney sweep because they had to have money the child had to have some way to provide for himself and so his father sold him before he could say weep before he could even speak before he could say weep which notice here is sweep uh there's an apostrophe taking out the S and so the child is saying before I could even say the word sweep my father sold me but in the in the irony of the poem is before he could even say weep before he could articulate the fact that he was miserable that he was sorrowful he was sold off into slavery and so from early on he had this this imprisonment in a world of slavery of being enslaved to the job of Chimney sleep then the second stands it transfers to another character Tom D daker who is sad because he's had his hair shaven off as they would frequently do with the the men and the young boys that shave their heads so they wouldn't get dirty filthy covered and lice or stuck by their hair in the chimney which would be horrible because he couldn't get out um and the young boy is sad because they're shaving off his head which is like Lamb's wolves and know the Lambs from the the the piper and from the first uh print uh the image of the Lamb is again brought up and this young boy who's now having to have his head shaved in order to go into this horrendous job but as we notice here too then the narrator says to the boy don't worry about it it's all going to be okay uh we're all going to do our jobs and we'll be fine and he goes to sleep and he has a dream where the angel unlocks their tomb and sets them free the sense that this life is a tomb this life is like being in that chimney and one day the angel will come and free us unlock our tomb set us free and we'll go dancing Across The Lawns uh and at the very end of the poem he says if we all just do our jobs we'll be fine there's a sense of the of the conventional wisdom just keep doing your job just buckle down uh almost like um stay calm and and and and carry on as the poster says U but in that conventional wisdom there's a subtle critique as well because as Blake kind of nudging suggests it's not all okay innocence wants to say do your job carry on it'll all be fine and yet in the periphery there's a sense for anybody that knows the difference that these young boys are condemned to a life of misery a life of of Terror a life of being imprisoned they'll grow up to be chimney sweeps and be as filthy and as poor as they were when they were children and most of these people had very short lives they died very young of either cold lung or of some kind of accident that same kind of irony we see in the plate of the work behind us the words fill up the plate it's almost like the words dominate this plate and at the very bottom you see at the periphery they have all these different images that are like trying to crowd in but at the very periphery the bottom you have the image of the Angel unlocking all the children they're going dancing and even though they're going to be dancing across the green Lawns as it says in the poem The Colors suggest the opposite is true it's actually going it's very dark it's almost like they're being released from one tomb into another and that seems to be the almost ironic cynicism of this poem of Innocence