William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper

According to the online Oxford Dictionary the definition of a child states “A person who has little or no experience in a particular area/A person or thing influenced by a specified environment”. I found that William Blake’s poems from his Songs of Innocence and Experience Collection, especially, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (TCS) Songs of Innocence, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (TCS) Songs of Experience and ‘A Little Boy Lost’ (ALBL) Songs of Experience, explore this transition from innocence to experience in a unique way. According to Blake, “innocence is not sufficient on its own; it is necessary for the individual to make the journey towards experience” (Duncun Wu 1994/1998, p.54). It is along this path that innocence is destroyed and experience is

In this case, I would have to concur with the title in saying that scenes of childhood in Romantic verse were not as idyllic as one would expect. The children were exploited, used, damaged and murdered, the extreme polar opposite of what you may imagine as the right path for them. “The grief of the child is also the loneliness of the soul in its sudden prison on earth”(Alfred Kazin, 1977, p.44). This is a perfect image of what the children in question were in, a prison. They were trapped in the guinea pig wheel of life, listening to the Janus-faced hierarchies in society. Any hope the child may have had was bound to be destroyed as they carried out in the predetermined mundane lives, all joy and innocence totally eradicated. Blake’s poetry, especially the aforementioned, told by either the narrator or Blake himself, tell seemingly personal stories of children, whose basic right to explore the wonders of the world, was snatched from them. They have the reoccurring theme, a corrupt society’s negative impact in the life of an idyllic childhood, and without a doubt, this was to be the bane of these childrens’