September 4, 2021

The Chimney Sweeper
By: William Blake (1789)

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 5 That curl'd like a lambs 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, 10 That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned & 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 15 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. 20 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.

Bibliography

• Ackroyd, Peter (1995). Blake: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books.
• Battenhouse, Henry M. (1958). English Romantic Writers. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc.
• Bloom, Harold (2003). William Blake. Bloom’s Major Poets. New York: Chelsea House.
• Frye, Northrup (1947). Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Gardner, Stanley (1969). Blake. Literary Critiques. New York: Arco.
• Green, Martin Burgess (1972). Cities of Light and Sons of Morning. Boston: Little, Brown.
• Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Major Authors. 2 (Tenth ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.
• Makdisi, Saree (2003). "The Political Aesthetic of Blake's Images". In Eaves, Morris. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. pp. 110–132.
• — (2015). Reading William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Paulin, Tom (March 3, 2007). "The Invisible Worm". Guardian. Retrieved 2021-09-04.
• Thompson, E. P. (1993). Witness Against the Beast. New York: The New Press.
• Tomlinson, Alan (1987). Song of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. MacMillan Master Guides. London: MacMillan Education.
• Wolfson, Susan J. (2003). "Blake's Language in Poetic Form". In Eaves, Morris. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. pp. 63–83.

Links and Web Resources

• Blake at the Internet Archive.
• Blake’s Notebook at the British Museum.
• William Blake Study Questions