William Blake, a famous English poet, wrote in 1789 a collection of poems called Songs of Innocence, made up of poems about innocence, childhood and hope. Among other poems he wrote “The Chimney Sweeper”, in which the narrator is a young chimney sweeper, sold by his father. This character tells the story of Tom Dacre, another chimney sweeper. This little boy dreamt about freedom and paradise, about an Angel who told him what was right, so he goes to work without any protest, indeed, he knows that he has to “be nice et to be a good boy”, as the Angel said to find peace after a hard life. So in this poem we can see different levels, and wonder how the author succeed in writing a poem which belongs to numerous kinds of meaning. First this poem appears as a nice story, a kind of tale for child, with childish characters and simplified world, but then we can distinguish another meaning of the poem: the picture of childhood, innocence, and above this, of happiness which is the privilege of innocents (this meaning is mainly seen through the dream of Tom Dacre and its moral). At last, the reader could wonder if there isn’t a critic hidden in this poem, behind the clearly visible moral, the critic of a society in which adults use innocence of children to get them to do what adults want.
“The Chimney Sweeper” is first a narrative poem, which tells a simple story. Indeed the situation is presented, with the sentence: “When my mother died”, which learns the reader when the story takes place and a part of the story of the narrator, whose name we ignore. Then we discover the character of Tom Dacre, defined as a young boy, with the adjective “little Tom Dacre” and which appears to be the main character, indeed, he is the one whose dream is told. The most important part of the poem ( three paragraphs among six). The importance of this dream is stressed by the expression “such a sight”, the adjective “such” insisting on the idea. The numerous temporal adverbs, sach as...