Exploitation

The two "Chimney Sweeper" poems by Blake are both powerful. The first one, told by a child young enough to still have a lisp, equates the innocent children with the innocence of the lambs previously found in Blake's poems. It also ends with the societal lie that injustice, hardship, and exploitation should merely be endured, because rewards lie in the eternal life beyond all misery. The second one, which emphasizes the "THE" at the beginning, as if to imply this the true, real chimney sweeper, exposes the deplorable conditions of the young chimney sweepers. In the child's mind, because he was happy and full of life, society had to break him and fill him with sorrow and death. The illustration does not even look like a child, but a beast. There is also the juxtaposition between white and black occurring in both poems. In the first, the soot turns the child's white hair black, and in the second, the blackened child is surrounded by the white snow. The soot blackening the child's hair is symbolic of outside society stealing the child's innocence, while the soot-covered child illustrates that the purity is no longer within the child, but only existing outside of it in nature. The snow is untouched by the societal demands and perceptions that have chained the child, and which could be symbolically washed away by the snow, as water washes away soot.
I like these poems because aside from Blake's perceptions of reality and society and the chains humans intertwine around these things, I always saw these two specifically as speaking against the horrors of industrial society. The exploitation of the innocent is one of the worst aspects of an industrial, capitalistic society. Even though we have mainly have stamped out child labor in the United States, it still persists in other countries. We also still have to deal with labor issues and class exploitation of adults in this country. However, I am hopeful that our new President will continue to "bolster labor" and examine the evils of capitalism and unnecessary consumption that have led us down this dark rabbit hole of recession and depression.