Essay --

The attitude of the chimney sweeper is one of hope and the speaker knows well that his hope will not be prevailed in this life but in the afterlife and we can see this as his attitude is portrayed with the diction that is used and the tone of jaded desertedness which leaves the mood at a very sympathetic place. This is opposed to the attitude of the poet as he expresses the boy’s lot in life by being very sarcastic and mocking him in the poem and this is present as we can see how he hyperbolizes the events in the boy’s life. The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) is told from the point of view of a young chimney sweeper, this persona is put on by the poet and is established in the opening stanza when the boy says "So your chimneys I sweep..." this poem is almost told in the form of a narrative and it is about a young boy telling of how his mother died and it does not mention any other details of her death other than the fact that she perished while he was very young. Then, it is said that his father sold him into slavery â€Å"while yet my tongue could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!† this ultimately makes the audience feel very sympatric toward the boy and we can see that he has accepted his lot in life. But, this is also the first place in the poem where the opposing attitudes of the chimney sweeper and the poet are present. Initially, upon reading the poem all the reader thinks of is the poor little boy, but here the poet is being sarcastic as he is saying the boy was made in to a chimney sweep before he could even say the word â€Å"sweep† in the case that the s- sound was left off and the word left his mouth as â€Å" ‘weep† which is also why the he uses the repetition of the word to emphasize the child’s misery while im... ...ofession is viewed as a joke to Blake and we can see this here. This whole idea is exacerbated by the use of imagery present in the poem that is achieved through the use of dark imagery. This attitude of the poet is against the one of the speaker who believes he is innocent and free and had the ability to play around and display hope in his dreams. Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) is a poem about the life of young chimney sweeps. We are presented with two juxtaposed attitudes in this poem and that would be the hope-filled attitude of the speaker pertaining to his lot in life and the attitude of satire that is displayed by the poet himself. In the end the message that conveyed through these conflicting attitudes is one that basically ensures the speaker will not be able to prosper in this life but surly have a chance to in the one after.