The Chimney-Sweeper’ in Songs of Experience is an even bleaker poem. Nine of the 12 lines are spoken by the sweep but poem begins with another speaker who spies ‘A little black thing among the snow’. The colour palette here is distinctly monochrome with none of the brightness and green of Tom’s dream in the Innocence poem; the sweep is depersonalised, a thing. The imagery is typical of the Experience poems: it’s set in winter and whereas the sweeps in Tom’s dream are ‘naked’, free of the clothing which in Blake often symbolises social convention or restriction, the speaker here wears ‘the clothes of death’ and sings ‘the notes of woe’ (unlike the laughing in the dream).
The speaker, though, remains determinedly happy. His instincts, like any child in Romantic writing, are positively driven even though, unlike the boys in the Innocence poem, he understands his oppression. Indeed, his happiness seems to be the reason that his parents sell him into slavery:
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
It also serves to absolve them from feelings of guilt as ‘They think they have done me no injury’. Having forced their son into enslavement, teaching him to sing ‘the notes of woe’, the parents then head to church to praise ‘God and his priest and king’, who, the boy tells us, ‘make up a heaven of our misery’. Interestingly, in an earlier draft, Blake wrote that this grim trio ‘wrap themselves up in our misery’, suggesting that they take comfort from the misery of others. The final version is far more powerful; the speaker’s parents collude with Church and State, actively constructing a heaven out of the misery of others, or, as Nicholas Marsh argues, ‘they “make up” a heaven where, in fact, there is “misery
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