In both the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience, there exists the poem of The Chimney-Sweeper. This tale of chimney sweepers is a far darker thing than the rosy falsehood portrayed in Mary Poppins. The life of a chimney sweep was hard. Young boys were essentially sold into slavery to work as chimney sweeps. When young Tom dreams of fellow sweepers "locked up in coffins of black" this is more than a simple nightmare. Being suffocated or burned alive in chimneys as narrow as 9 square inches was a common fate for these children. The flues were so narrow that only small bodies could climb them, often nude, or clog them if the child was unlucky, or lucky, depending on your perspective. These were narrow, sometimes burning columns of jagged angles and suffocating blackness that became the world for these young unwanteds. Young Tom is dreaming of fellow children he knows who died in those flues, whose short life was suffocated in that searing blackness. Tom awakes and goes about his duties. Tom is happy and warm, and fears no harm because even that suffocating blackness brings relief from the life he knows. And this is the song of Innocence. An innocence ripped from these children. An innocence that only death will preserve.
In the Songs of Experience, we see the loss of this innocence. Death blankets the child in this story, His clothes stained black with soot, his face ashen and woeful due to his duties. This child may "dance and sing," but it is the song of the doomed. Even sweeps that survived the flues were deformed by their cramped work, and developed cancer in their late teens and 20's. This was a short, brutal, and woeful life. The boy notes that his parents have gone to "praise God and His priest and king," but this God has abandoned this "little black thing," or at least this is what he believes. The song of the damned is his only song; the dance of the cursed is his only dance. He has no use for the pretty nightmares that Tom finds respite in. Death has not found him, though it has marked him as Its own. Their parents abandon them, their bodies betray them, and death has yet to take them. That is their experience, not life but a living death.
When I was reading The Chimney-Sweeper poems, I couldn't help but to parallel them with slavery--especially the latter one (Experience).
ReplyDeleteIn Innocence, the chimney sweeper finds solace in death being a release, much like the slaves. In Experience, the songs of the damned and the dances of the cursed remind me of the woeful music and dance that the slaves performed while in servitude. During the long voyages to the colonies, the captain and crew would force the slaves from asunder to dance and sing on the deck, for exercise and for entertainment.
The lines, "And because I am happy & dance & sing./ They think they have done me no injury" perfectly illustrate this point. Although the slaves did sing and dance, like the young chimney sweeper, they remained and suffered in living a life worse than death.