The chimney sweepers of the late 18th century held a dangerous job, to be pushed down inside chimneys with brushes and bags so as to clean their interiors. Unfortunately, many of the chimney sweeps were children as they were the only ones who could squeeze into such tight places, and not knowing of the health dangers of continuous exposure to ash and smoke trusted their parents and did as they were told. Both of William Blake's poems that comment on this job utilize very similar rhyme scheme, diction, and syntax but the subtle differences between the two contribute the two different viewpoints of the poems. The first poem showing innocence and naivety, the second more mature and experienced.
In the first of Blake's poems, an "aabb" rhyme scheme is used in each stanza, while in the second poem "aabb" is used in the first stanza, but the second and third uses an "abab" pattern. The rhyming of the words adds an element of youth, which is what Blake is trying to do as he is speaking through the mouths of children in each poem. In the first poem however, the child is more innocent, doing his duty because they trust the adults and the Angel that tell them everything is going to be great and that the child and his comrades will be free and happy. In the second poem the child has seemed to have grown up more, he now knows that being a chimney sweeper is not something to be grateful for, but he assumes his parents do not notice the hardship "[doing him] no injury" (poem 2, line 10). He still trusts his parents but has experience to not be as naive as before. The rhyme scheme matches this difference between the children's perspectives as in the first poem the pattern makes the speech of the child seem shorter with more simple phrases, as if he does not generally compose complex thoughts, and each thought is sectioned into its own rhyming couplet. The rhyme pattern of the second poem, however, makes it seems like each stanza is a complete thought as the beginning lines are connected to the last. This difference in the rhyme patterns of each poem contribute to the image of the speaker in each instance and help convey the different messages of innocence and experience,
The diction and syntax in each poem also separate the messages in each poem. The first poem contains many blunt and direct words, outright telling us what has happened, there are not very many emotional adjectives for tone so the tone can be viewed as more objective or neutral. The second poem, though also containing rather simple words, uses more serious words such as "death", "woe", "injury", and "misery". Instead of the indifference of innocence we can see the speaker feels very negatively about the job that he must do. The difference in diction also conveys to us the difference between the naivety of the first child in comparison to the experience of the second.
Reflection:
I would grade myself a 5 or possibly a 4. My analysis of the two poems is good but could have been more specific. I can work on having a deeper analysis citing more literary devices in comparison to my more shallow analysis. I can also work on smoother transitions in y writing, in this instance referring to each poem was hard considering that the had the same title and were written by the same person. Consequently i referred to each poem by order which did not complicate things too much by my writing could have been smoother. I need to work on my wording skills in order to better convey what I want to say.
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