The reading for August 29 includes The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, pp. 3-28 and Blake, "Songs of Innocence and of Experience," some of which you will find below. Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" begin on page 119 of the textbook. Please read carefully before the class period.

The Chimney Sweeper 1

When my mother died I was very young
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.2
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

Theses little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
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 sleeping he had such a sight,
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
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

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. 3

1. Chimney-sweeps were young children, mostly boys, whose impoverished parents sold them into the business, or who were orphans, outcasts, or illegitimate children with no other means of living. It was filthy, health-ruining labor, aggravated by overwork and inadequate clothing, food and shelter. Among the hazards were burns, permanently blackened skin, deformed legs, black lung disease and cancer of the scrotum. Protective legislation passed in 1788 was never enforced. Blake's outrage at this exploitation also sounds in "London.' Admiring the poem, Charles Lamb sent it to James Montgomery (a topical poet and radical-press editor) for inclusion in The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing Boy's Album (1824), which he was assembling for the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Infant Chimney-Sweepers.
2. With a relevant pun, the child's lisping street cry advertising his trade, "sweep! sweep!"
3. A typical conduct homily.

Please refer to the study questions below for " The Chimney Sweeper ," " The Little Black Boy ," " The Clod and the Pebble ," " The Tyger ," " The Sick Rose ," " The Garden of Love ," "London," and "The Poison Tree.".

"The Chimney Sweeper"
The footnote to the last line of the poem suggests that the moral of the story here is "a typical conduct homily." Does the poem as a whole endorse this homily as an accurate summary of the poem's meaning? As an accurate description of how one should live in the world?

"The Little Black Boy"
Compare the poem to the illustration. Do the black boy and the white boy have different relationships with God? How would you characterize (using the words of the poem as evidence) their relationship with each other?

"The Cod and the Pebble"
Is either "right" about the nature of love? Does the poem endorse either point of view. Think about what a "clod" and a "pebble" are. Why would the poem use these things to speak their ideas?

"The Tyger"
Is there an answer to the question posed in the first stanza? Why does the poem use "could" in the first stanza and "dare" in the final stanza? What does the poem think of the tiger?

"The Sick Rose"
In line 7, why does the poem use the word "love"? What kind of "love" does the "invisible worm" bear to the rose? What is the effect of the poem addressing itself to the "sick rose" rather than to the worm?

"The Garden of Love"
What is the poem's attitude towards human nature? Are the speaker (and his joys and desires) innately good, or are social institutions necessary to clamp down the evil of human beings?

"London"
What are the "mind forg'd manacles"? Is this a "hopeless" poem" ? Does it trump a poem like "The Ecchoing Green" or are they equally powerful?

"A Poison Tree"
Do we condemn the speaker of the poem for being "glad" about exacting revenge upon his "foe"? Or can we condemn him for not "turning the other cheek"?

William Blake 1757-1827

It was from Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell that a sensationally transgressive rock band of the 1960s, the Doors, took their name: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: In- -finite. But unlike the Doors, Blake needed no pharmaceutical assistance in cleansing his vision. His eccentricity and imaginative intensity, which seemed like madness to more than a few contemporaries, emerged from a childhood punctuated by such events as beholding God's face pressed against his window, seeing angels among the haystacks, and being visited by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. When his favorite brother died in 1787, Blake claimed that he saw his "released spirit ascend heavenwards, clapping its hand for joy." Soon after, he reports, this spirit visited him with a critical revelation of the method of "Illuminated Printing" that he would use in his major poetical works. Rebellious, unconventional, fiercely idealistic, Blake became a celebrity in modern countercultureÑAllen Ginsberg and many of the Beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s cited him as a major influence. But for a good part of the nineteenth century, he was known only to a coterie. He did not support himself as a poet but got by on patronage and commissions for engraving and painting. His projects included the Book of Job and other scenes from the Bible; Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims; characters in Spenser's Faerie Queene; Milton's L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained; Gray's The Bard; Young's Night Thoughts; and Blair's The Grave. His obscurity as a poet was due in part to the difficulty of his work after the mid-1790s but chiefly to the very limited issue of his books, a consequence of the painstaking and time-consuming process of "Illuminated Printing." He hoped to reach a wider audience with a private exhibition of his illustrations in 1809, but his adventurous originality, coupled with his cantankerous and combative personality, left him ignored, except by one of the radical journals, The Examiner, which called him a lunatic in a vicious review. At the time of his death, he was impoverished and almost entirely unknown except to a small group of younger painters. Only in 1863 did interest begin to grow, thanks to Alexander Gilchrist's biography, The Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus, its second volume a selection of poems edited by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The revival was fanned by the enthusiasm of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and subsequent essays by Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel's brother), and William Butler Yeats. Although Blake had no formal education, he was an avid reader, immersing himself in English poetry, the Bible, and works of mysticism and philosophy, as well as a study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. With precocious talent as a sketcher, he hoped to become a painter, but his father could not afford the tuition, and so apprenticed him at age fourteen as an engraver. During this seven-year term, Blake found time to write the poems gathered into his first publication, Poetical Sketches (1783), his only unilluminated volume. The later illuminated books, by contrast, were not products of the letter-press, but of a process of hand-etching designs onto copper plates, using these plates to ink-print pages that were then individually hand-colored and hand-bound into volumes. So labor-intensive a method was not adaptable to any production of quantity: there are, for instance, only twenty-seven known copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and only nine of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Yet Blake was committed to the product. By involving his verbal text with pictures and pictorial embellishments, he created books of extraordinary beauty and an innovative "composite art" of word and image. In this art, the script is visually meaningfulÑflowing versus starkly blocked letters, for instanceÑand the pictorial elements play a significant role, sometimes illustrating, sometimes adding another perspective or an ironic comment on the verbal text, sometimes even presenting contradictory information. .

• The complete biography of William Blake begins on page 104 of The Longman Anthology of British Literature.

Text and notes taken from The Longman Anthology of British Literature copyright ©1999 by Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.
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