Fresh from a discussion on Tom Wingfield
in The Glass Menagerie, who seeks
with his heart and soul, to escape his harsh mundane reality, let’s now get a
glimpse of yet another Tom from Blake’s Songs
of Innocence, which offers another liberation of a different ball-game
altogether!
In the mystic poet William Blake’s “The
Chimney Sweeper,” there’s a little boy [who also doubles up as the speaker of
the poem,] who’s been sold by his own father into the chimney-sweeping business
at a very tender age, after his mother passes away!
This little boy introduces us, the reader,
to a fellow chimney-sweep by name Tom and to his equally wretched predicament! When
Tom’s hair was tonsured in order to prevent the soot from settling on it, Tom’s
miserable cries rend the heart of the narrator boy! Hence he comforts and
consoles Tom, who then falls asleep.
Now in his sleep, Tom gets a wonderful
dream! In this amazing dream, Tom and a host of his friends are liberated from
their ‘coffins’ by an angel. The angel comes to them all with a special key on
him, and opens the locks on all the coffins and sets them all free!
The little boys who are thus set free,
are shown to enjoy their first stint or bout with freedom. They are shown
running with such mirth and jollity through a meadow, and then they get to wash
themselves to their heart’s content in a river out there, emerging pure and
white as could be! Now, the angel consoles Tom by telling him that, if he were to be always a good boy like this, this paradise would be his, forever!
When Tom wakes up out of this ‘visionary
gleam’, he is awestruck by the impact of the imaginative liberation offered
unto him by this wonderful dream!
This acts a stimulant, a fillip and a boost for
little Tom to comfort and console his little heart, and now with a blessed
assurance of liberation that’s offered to him by an angel, [albeit on fantasy mode,] then,
he gets to gather his tools, and along with his companion - the narrator-boy heads out for his
drudgy, hum-drum, monotonous routine of sorts!
The dream-mode liberation offered to Tom proves
to have such a positive, refreshing and rejuvenating effect on him; now he seeks to hope [against hope], that one fine day, ‘i shall overcome’ and ‘deep in my
heart I do believe’ that our lives will improve for the better, on that ‘one fine day’!
In another sense then, liberation for the
little boy looks an absolute mirage, a very distant possibility of sorts! So on a symbolic
vein, that ‘one fine day’, could also connote to mean his death!
I've personally felt that only
a poet of Blake’s grandeur could have really painted for us all a poem of this intensity
and magnitude in such amazing lines, with such a solemn lyrical touch to its
texture! how beautifully he weaves the story of Tom with such poignancy for us
all!
I reproduce below the entire poem –
When
my mother died I was very young,
And
my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could
scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So
your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
There's
little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That
curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,
"Hush,
Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You
know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
And
so he was quiet, and that very night,
As
Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!
That
thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,
Were
all of them locked up in coffins of black;
And
by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And
he opened the coffins & set them all free;
Then
down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,
And
wash in a river and shine in the Sun.
Then
naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They
rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.
And
the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd
have God for his father & never want joy.
And
so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark
And
got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Though
the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So
if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
To
be continued…
image: sweeperjikikabudotblogspotdotcom
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