William Blake was a social critic of his time yet his criticism also reflects society of our own time as well. He mainly communicates humanitarian concerns through his “Songs of Innocence and Experience” which express two opposite states of the human soul, happiness or misery, heaven or hell. “Innocence” expresses the state of childhood, into which we are all born, a state of free imagination and infinite joy. “Experience”, according to Blake, is man’s state when disaster has destroyed the initial ecstasy.
He believes that problems concerning child labor, religious institutions, individual apathy, prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases, war and marriage are the result of humankind’s carelessness. He explores this point of view particularly in two of his poems “London” and “The Chimney Sweeper” both from “The Songs of Innocence”. He voices his disapproval over these injustices caused by humankind primarily through the use of irony, imagery, symbolism and a clever choice of language.
Through a set of literary devices such as imagery and language, Blake protests against various forms of oppression resulting from humans in his poem “London” which speaks about a slice of life in London in his times. Blake believes that an individual’s state of mind enslaves itself. Therefore, he refers to the Thames and the city streets as “chartered”(1) alluding to the image that man-made conventions and laws have succeeded in placing man in captivity and making them unable to escape from their molded path.
Blake also implies that man perverts everything into something impure. The water, which was once a beautiful natural river, has now become polluted for merely economic purposes, which illustrates man’s negligence. Blake also believes that without man’s government, man could live in peace and in freedom. Instead, the image we are becoming used to is one of “marks of woe”(4) on the faces of the pedestrians, and we hear “every infants cry of fear”(6).
Blake states that people participate in their oppression by not helping to solve society’s problems when he writes that there is an effect of “mind-forg’d manacles”(8) on every man. In the third stanza, Blake describes that the people involved in religious institutions participate in the oppression because they not only allow child labor but encourage it. In addition, Blake states that the “Palace” (12), symbolizing man’s government, also oppresses society because soldiers are forced to sacrifice their lives and that these tired victims can only sigh by not speaking up to their oppression:
How the chimney-sweerper’s cry Every blackening church appals, And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down the Palace walls. (9-12) By the end of the poem, man’s repression has clearly caused the death of everything. Hence the husband who visits the prostitute will bring home “Harlot’s curse”(14) symbolizing sexually transmitted diseases which will infect the infant and the curse of a forever ruined marriage.
Thus, Blake communicates that people are ignoring the infant’s tear, which is a form of protest, and as a consequence, their oppression is a self-perpetuating cycle. Blake expresses in “The Chimney Sweeper” that humankind is not part of the solution but part of the problem. Here Blake believes that humankind rips away the innocence of a child with the practice of child labor. The image of a “black” child suggests that it is covered in filth and soot because he is forced by society to do his or her duty as a chimneysweeper.
The child then helplessly cries “weep, weep”(2) alluding to “sweep, sweep” having felt it’s innocence stripped away from it. Blake suggests that society is cruel and unforgiving to the life of misery that they themselves once lived. Humans allow their own innocent children to bear the suffering of centuries on their back. The second stanza expresses the child’s anger and bitterness against humankind who has put him in a life of misery indicating that humans are blind to the oppression that they are causing.
Blake believes that humans distant themselves from happiness and love when he states “because I was happy upon the heath and smil’d among the winter’s snow”(5-6), which suggests that he was then put into a woeful life for a child’s happiness is not allowed. The images of “clothes of death”(7) and “notes of woe” suggest that it is humans who direct the children into a life of oppression. Finally, Blake criticizes what the people in religious institutions have not done for children, and he opposes against the distressed life these institutions allow them to endure.
Ironically, Blake does not describe the church as a holy sanctuary but as a place where the people “make up a heaven of our misery”(12) because the church that is a heaven for humankind is in reality a made up hell for the children chimneysweepers. Therefore, Blake disapproves of the injustices caused by society. Throughout these two poems, William Blake describes how humankind has created it’s own oppression through child labor, religious institutions, marriage, or in other words, through all aspects of society.
He expresses that man’s mind represents the source of many of societal injustices during his time in London and that people have become detached from the common ties to the land and are therefore blind to society’s corruption. Man’s guiltiness is evident because the only ones crying are the innocent children yet none is capable of hearing them. Therefore, Blake feels the greatest despair when he considers the effect of these social injustices on the innocent, the young, the helpless who suffer for humankind’s ignorance.
