A Note on Blake's Method

The image above reproduces the title "The Chimney Sweeper," from Blake's Songs of Innocence. It does points up one of the most striking aspects of Blake's art: the dynamic relation of word and illustration. Even in this low-resolution image, the viewer's eye is drawn to the interfusion of the two: serifs ramify into vegetative (or perhaps smoke-like) forms that here and there meet and extend the marginal illustration, so that we're forced to take in the plate's impression as a whole, and not as a text glossed by illuminations or, what would be even more antithetical to Blake's method, as text and subtext.

Some scholars, however, W. J. T. Mitchell, for one, insist that almost every Blake poem "is a perfectly adequate, self-sustaining text, which does not need the accompanying illustrations to make it a successful work of art" (Pagliaro, p. 23). To my mind, the highly valorized formulation "accompanying illustrations" robs Blake's books of their entrancing power: if anything the engravings are the literal ground or medium of the poetry. Without them, the words are unmoored from their decisive materiality, just as the images in isolation, though never merely painterly, are too idiomatic for any confident explication. It's significant that tropes derived from his engraver's craft figure prominently in Blake's poetry, as though he were associating the locality inhabited by his poetic genius not with the Word, but with plate, aqua fortis, wax, brushes, burin, and press.

Look at the title detail in the frame above and notice how the S wraps around in tendrils that support the images of sweeps. The sweeper in the C is carrying his bag of soot, which also served as bedding for the climbing boys. In the full-plate image, see how the engraved forms are used to separate stanzas and to define the edges of the print.

In a time of television and VRML web pages, it's hard to imagine how much of Blake's achievement was a reaction against the privileged status of the written word. (Even decades later, in one of his late sonnets, Wordsworth would rail against the emerging illustrated broadsheets: "Avaunt this vile abuse of printed page!") The realization that these are, in fact, "Songs" brings us yet closer to the manifold quality of Blake's method. Indeed, Blake may have set many of the Songs to music and sung them himself. Peter Ackroyd quotes a letter in which Blake reports on one of the conversaziones he attended at the home of the Rev. and Mrs. Mathews (and satirized in "An Island in the Moon"): "After this [the recital of one of the Songs of Innocence] they all fell silent for a quarter of an hour" (Ackroyd, pp. 85-86).

It's unlikely, perhaps, that such a company would fall silent for half a minute, much less fifteen at a stretch, but what becomes more evident in the later works, with their almost full-blown synesthesia and historical-epic ambitions, is already emerging in the Songs of Innocence: the restrictions of medium and genre in art and poetry--and the physiological restrictions of our senses themselves--are ever at odds with the will to create and perceive things in the full plenitude of their being.

Blake, like other visionaries, didn't doubt that plenitude. And finding that life is a mere subset inscribed within it, as by a Urizenic compass, Blake strove to widen the circle by whatever means were at hand. The gilt-edged word might be Gesamtkunstwerk, a German term that conveys the idea of a totalized work of art. But it's particuarly apt here, for as engraver, poet, musician, and mystic, Blake worked with as much innovation, and as successfully, as any English artist to achieve it.

Notes on Stanza 1

If you've taken a look at Deborah Noel's bibliography (linked from the Title Page), you've probably noticed that there's not much agreement about what the poem is "about." Like so much of Blake's poetry, "The Chimney Sweeper's" ambiguities dissolve and shift under the weight of interpretation.

Right down to the phonemic level, we're faced with a provisional choice between the elided street cry of a child too young to announce his trade, and the uncoerced "weep" of a mere infant. They might both be true, in the sense that a pun is "true."

Certainly, Blake is fond of puns: they turn up again and again in his poetry. But puns of the conventional sort derive wit from the yoking together of incommensurable terms: in a sense, they rob "truth" or certitude from both sides, and repay the debts with an irreducible possibility. Blake's punning is of an altogether different sort; it's rather more like a parable, in which meaning sidles outward from a linguistic center. This may be why the best of Blake's critics have been "strong" readers, readers who feel some sense of confidence, even when, as Geoffrey Hartman puts it, "with Blake, we're never quite sure" (Hilton, p. 245).

There's another sense, though, in which both the "weep" of the text and its implied "[s]weep" are at once true. They track a linguistic gradient of the commodification of the self. For a Londoner of Blake's time, particularly for a tradesperson who, as an engraver, was working at the very cusp of mechanical reproduction, the encroachments of expanding civic capitalism would have been keenly felt. In the poem's patent terms, a child whose mother has died is suddenly worth something. The scene of primal attachment, of child to mother, is displaced by an eruption of the underlying system of property rights and barter. The repeated "weep weep weep weep," with its introduction of metrical difficulty into the poem, is no mispronunciation, but rather, a clear articulation of the commodity fetish to which the child--no longer child, but chimney sweeper--must succumb.

And the reader knows. "So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep." The reader, indeed, is caught in the same web of relationships broken by deaths, and remolded into fungible shapes by the plasticising Invisible Hand of capital.

Notes on Stanza 2

In little Tom Dacre, Harold Bloom sees "the Lamb, called by Christ's name, who became a little child, only to have his clothing of delight shorn by the exploiter of Experience" (Bloom, pp. 6-7). This is "spilt religion," in T. E. Hulme's famous dismissive phrase, at its most exalted. Like Isaac bound by Abraham on the hilltop ("Father, behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"), Tom's "innocence" blinds him to the totalizing religious and moral structures that shape his predicament. The narrator's sacrifice--his shearing and induction--has already taken place; from the infantile "weep" he's moved into a world of commonality as little Tom's comforter, or properly into the rôle of socializing agent: "Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare, / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." The desacralized rite becomes a nursery of English virtues: forbearance and quietude.

Though the resonances of the sacrificial lamb--"who cried when his head / That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd"--prefigure the New Dispensation, the poem offers only a poignantly insufficient redemption in the dream to come.

Notes on Stanza 3

"And so he was quiet": Tom's submission to what Bloom calls the speaker's "prophetic and menacing sublimity" (Bloom, p. 6) is almost complete. But the "illogic"--Bloom's word again--of the sweeper's counsel of resignation returns with psychic force in Tom's dream. Hearthsides are the proverbial site of intimate conversation, of comfortable disclosure, where the weariness and chill of London's 18^th-century street life could go up in smoke.

For Tom, though, a mere child who, by accident of birth or misfortune, finds himself exiled from the fireside, the irrationality of his situation cloaks itself in a dream, reported, not by himself, but by the poem's speaker: "thousands of sweepers ... / Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black[.]" To the sweepers the hearth is a cinder-floored maw that opens, quite literally for most, into death; the chimneys are coffins of black. And a child, continually blackened with carcinogenic soot, might also be said to occupy a corporeal coffin of black.

The overdetermined dream makes no distinction: in its literalness, and platitudinous religiosity, it restates the irrationality of Tom's innocent perception of his lot in life, while beneath it--beneath it all--the "rationalism" of the era's political economy buoys up a system that finds symptomatic expression in the quasi-religious consolations of the dream

Notes on Stanza 4

In the intaglio etching below, copied after Collings, Blake has left us a picture of May Day festivities in 18^th-century London.

The small figure at the lower right-center of the engraving, is one of the climbing boys. Ackroyd quotes Southey, who witnessed one of the May Day festivals some years after Blake's depiction:

[The sweepers] clothes seemed as if they had been dragged through the chimney, as indeed had been the case, and these sooty habiliments were bedecked with pieces of foil, and with ribbons of all gay characters, flying like streamers in every direction as they whisked around: their sooty faces were reddened with rose-pink, and in the middle of each cheek was a patch of gold leaf, the hair was frizzed out, and as white as powder could make it ... and in like manner ornamented with ribbons, and foil, and flowers. (Ackroyd, pp. 123-24)

This one day of the year, the chimney sweeps were freed from their miserable occupation, and took a place at the center of London's dizzying whirl. It must have seemed peculiarly dreamlike to the city's inhabitants, to see these figures from the margins of their economy scamping with milkmaids, rouged and coiffed and tricked out like enfants from the French court. And dreamlike, it may have been a mechanism by which the society revealed to itself, in a cloaked carnival atmosphere, its repressed corporate guilt over the sweepers' plight. They were, after all, an indispensable (though individually, easily replaced) part of the city's viability.

In little Tom's dream, the "Angel" with the "bright key" becomes the mythic extension of the speaker's "Hush Tom never mind it." The only key that can turn the wards of the "black coffins" is held by the Angel of Death. The consolation of the dream, a promise of "fresh aire and green champaign" is, like the consolation offered for Tom's shorn head, an instrument of psychic repression in which a loss of life and delight temporarily displaces the heavy weight of Tom's intelligible world.

The irony is heightened by a shift of tense at the third line: "Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run / And wash in a river and shine in the Sun." These are the lines Blake illustrates at the foot of the plate. There's no doubt that Blake believed death to be a passage into joyousness, but the "death" offered in the dream is sheer innocence, and translates into Tom's experience as acquiescence to his sacrifice.

Notes on Stanza 5

From the present-indicative interlude of Tom's dream, with its apotheosis in the ascension of the thousands of sweepers who leave the implements of their trade and "rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind," the poem returns with a piece of overtly monitory advice from the Angel: "if he'd be a good boy, / He'd have God for his father & never want joy."

John Wesley, whose ministry inspired Methodism (it's sometimes forgotten that he died an Anglican) made this note on 2 John 1:9:

Receive this as a certain Rule. Whosoever transgresseth any Law of God, or of Christ, hath not God--for his Father and his God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ--believing and obeying it, he hath both the Father and the Son--for his God.

The echos of Wesley's gloss in the Angel's words to Tom are unmistakable. They introduce the central dilemma of the poem: what is Tom's "duty"? Caught in a web of sacrifice to a system whose religious and economic mechanisms of coercion are beyond his, or anyone else's, control, what does it mean to be a "good boy"? Tom once again finds himself in the position of Isaac beholding the kindling. He has no choice but accession to a test of faith that's meant for others. And they--whether a father who, like the speaker's, has sold him into misery, or the reader, whose chimneys are swept--they have turned away from the difficulties of the test, leaving the child, perhaps literally, to burn.

Notes on Stanza 6

Exhausted of irony, the poem folds back into a prosaic description of the sweepers' morning. The thousands of sweeps who had risen "upon clouds" to "sport in the wind" now rise to the brutality of their daily life: "And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark / And got with our bags & our brushes to work." Tom's dreamwork, however, has done its job, and in the final couplet's summation of his innocent--and thus mistaken--attempt to extract intelligibility from the vision, he draws a meager and tragic consolation: "Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm, / So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm."

Indeed Tom's "duty"--filth, disfigurement, and probable death--is the only recourse open to him. But the banality of the last line won't bear much looking into; certainly it isn't meant ironically, unless it's the pure intratextual irony of Tom's and the speaker's now convergent acceptance of oppressed misfortune. In a poem of social protest, intratextual irony is insufficient (at least for all but lit-crit-hardened graduate students). Whatever poignancy and pity the reader may feel is deflected by the implicit anger that Blake communicates toward an economic and religious system that weaves us all into its warp.

More likely, we're meant to take the appeal to duty straight-up. On October 7, 1803, Blake writes from London to his sometime-patron and friend William Haley:

O that I could live as others do in a regular succession of Employment this wish I fear is not to be accomplished to me.... [N]othing is necessary to me but to do my Duty & to rejoice in the exceeding joy that is always poured out on my Spirit. (Erdman, p. 737)

The word "duty" recurs frequently in Blake's letters, less often in his poetry. (If you've reached this page via another route, you might want to have a look at the online Blake Concordance.) The word rarely bears the disparaging connotations that one might expect, given Blake's artistic and religious Dissenting opinions.

In "The Chimney Sweeper," a heartbreaking poem if ever Blake wrote one, we're carried into a world of unredeemed, and unredeemable, innocence, whose tragedy is heightened by a failure to carry its outrage into the active world of experience. A London without the warmth of the hearth would be unthinkable, and, without the sweeps, there would have been many Great Fires. Blake and Catherine were childless, but, by all accounts, the poet got on well with children. And yet, he, too, probably had his chimney swept.

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.

Theres 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 a 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.