Read Online Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books by Arnold Weinstein - Free Book Online

of innocence and experience, enabling us to get a sighting on how we are both formed and deformed as creatures of culture. For all these reasons, it makes sense to look first at the later poem, the rendition of the chimney sweep in
Songs of Experience:
    A little black thing in the snow
,
Crying “weep! weep!” in notes of woe!

“Where are thy father and mother? Say?”—

“They are both gone up to the church to pray
.
“Because I was happy upon the heath
,
And smil’d among the winter’s snow
,
They clothed me in the clothes of death
,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe
.
“And because I am 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.”
     
    There is nothing difficult at all here. The poem is a broadside against the gross exploitation of children, all the grosser by being trumped up in the clothes of piety. The retrospective voice of the child is experienced, and it speaks clearly its victimization: reduced to a “thing in the snow,” with only “weep” as language, it spells out its lesson of violation and victimization. Clothed for death, uncomplaining, it is sacrificed by its parents to the spurious claims of both Church and Throne. The equation could not be more obvious, and Blake ends with a fine spatial, even artisanal, metaphor: the “heaven” posed/constructed by that (vicious) trio of God, priest, and king is made up, literally composed, of children’s misery. Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the “innocence” of the parents themselves, who think they’ve done the child no injury. Anyone reading this poem sees it as a clear indictment, expressed by the comprehending victim, of a religious and political order that manifestly commoditizes its children.
    Now, “knowing” (from the later poem) that chimney sweeps are victims of abuse at the hands of family, Church, and state, we are in a position to read the earlier poem with the same motif, but seen from the optic of innocence:
    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, and in soot I sleep
.
There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
,
That curled like a lamb’s 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 opened the coffins and 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
.
     
    Few poems in the English canon move me as much as this one. At first we see the resemblances with the later, overtly critical piece: the child’s only words are the telltale “ ’weep! ’weep! ’weep!”—the child’s garbled version of “sweep”? or the natural language of pain?—but the parental arrangements are more severe: the mother is dead, and the child has been sold into servitude, to sleep in soot. One next expects—“one” being a reader with some sense of justice and some belief in children’s rights—a tirade lambasting such treatment, but instead our child speaker tells us of his comrade Tom Dacre’s experience. Little Tom’s head was shaved, but he was comforted by our speaker, who explained the advantages of