‘The Chimney Sweeper’

Abstract

This is the most complex of the dramatic monologues in Songs of Innocence, and has been the focus of much critical discussion. After borrowing a copy of Songs of Innocence from C.A. Tulk, Coleridge expressed himself ‘perplexed’ by this poem while declaring that ‘Night’ and ‘The Little Black Boy’ had given him pleasure ‘in the highest degree’. Hazlitt ‘preferred’ it to the other songs Crabb Robinson read to him, but felt that it showed Blake to have ‘no sense of the ludicrous’ and that the songs in general were ‘too deep for the vulgar’. In 1824 the poem was printed in The Chimney Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing Boy’s Album by James Montgomery, who explained that it came from ‘a very rare and curious little work’ named Songs of Innocence, and had been ‘communicated by Mr. Charles Lamb’. According to Alan Cunningham, the poem ‘touched the feelings of Bernard Barton so deeply’ that he wrote to Lamb asking about the author; and Lamb replied that if Blake was still alive he was ‘one of the most extraordinary persons of the age’. Cunningham himself included a text of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ in the account of Blake which he published in 1830 in his Lives of British Painters; and he declared the poem to be ‘rude enough truly, but yet not without pathos’.