Black Songs of Innocence and Experience

In William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, he contrasts the innocent, peaceful world of childhood against the world of corruption and impurity of adulthood. Blake is showing us two different perspectives on the world’s value and limitations. Most of the poems that he written were set up as pairs, so the same situation or problem is seen in the eyes of the innocence first and then experienced. For example, “The Chimney Sweeper”, it is seen by the innocent child but later, we see it again in the Songs of Experience with a different perspective in life of a chimney sweeper.
The Songs of Innocence dramatizes the naïve hopes and fears of the children and the transformation of the child growing into adulthood. Some of the poems are written in the perspective of the children and others are about the children but in the adult’s perspective. Many of these poems attract the positive aspects of nature human understanding the corruption and impurity of experience. In the Song of Innocence’s “The Chimney Sweeper, we have a corrupted society but we are given innocent purity thoughts for the character and speaker. In this poem, the main speaker is a small boy who was sold into the chimney sweeper business when his mother died. The speaker is telling the story of a chimney sweeper by the name of Tom Dacre. It starts off with Tom having a dream that the entire chimney sweepers are “lock’d up in coffins of black” (169) and then an angel comes to release them from the coffins. Tom Dacre is given a message from the angel, if he is a good boy than the angel will lead him to his own paradise. In this poem, we see that the boys are suffering from the terrible life of a chimney sweeper. We are given the idea if the boys do the work that they are supposed to that they will get to their own paradise when they die. We have moved away for this era, have seen that what the society has done to these children has made them believe that what they are doing is okay because they have a...