The boys can only achieve freedom in their dreams, because the reality of their situation is so hopeless. Dunn's boy worker works hard, but he is not consumed by his work, and he knows it is not a permanent, horrible situation.
Dunn's poem, on the other hand, shows another dark side of work. His narrator is a boy old enough to work in a factory, but still young enough to want to enjoy his summer vacation. He does not have to work, and that makes all the difference between the two poems. Dunn writes, "I quit before the summer was over, / exercised the prerogatives of my class / by playing ball all August / and spent the money I'd earned / on Barbara Winokur, who was beautiful" (Dunn). Blake's poem shows the dark desperation of work, while Dunn's poem shows the boredom and futility of work on an assembly line. Both works see labor as something difficult and demeaning, but they show two very different working classes, and that is the biggest difference in these two works.
One element of these two poems that might be overlooked is the ethics of young people working so hard. Even in "Hard Work," the narrator says he comes home sore from a hard day's work. Dunn writes, "When I came home at night my body / hurt with that righteous hurt / men have brought home for centuries, / the hurt that demands / food and solicitation, that makes men / separate, lost" (Dunn). Neither of these young men is afraid of hard work, but one has it thrust upon him without...
The poem strikes a continual contrast between light and dark, like the natural, naked whiteness of Tom's hair, and the boy's bodies in heaven, "naked and white," with all of the unnecessary baggage of their labor "left behind." The poem also contrasts the ease of "sporting in the wind" rather than going into the pits of hellish, dark hot chimneys that is won if the boys are good and do
The fact that the unnamed narrator, who could not have been more than five or six years old, shows a young boy's chilling resignation to his fate. These passages therefore show how thoroughly social conventions can "brainwash" society members, especially those who experience the most brutal oppression. This acquiescence to social convention is seen most clearly in Tom Dacre's dream. The ideal of a boy playing and running shows by contrast
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker whose works continue to influence readers today. His collection of illuminated poems contained in one of his most well-known works, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, provide opposing views in this set of poems, Blake helps to expose what he thought was innocent and how experience changes these view. In "The Chimney Sweeper," a poem contained in both Songs of
William Blake Social Indictment and a Religious Vision of Salvation in William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" Written in 1789 and published in the collection, Songs of Innocence, William Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper," shows the cruel world of being a child in post-industrial London. The narrator of the poem is a chimney sweeper who was sold into the profession by his father, his mother having died when he was very young. Before
" The use of "coffins in black" as symbolism for death aptly justifies the use of the word "weep" to capture the abusive nature of the sweepers' work, not to mention the unfair conditions in work these young workers were forced to agree with. Lacking any choices or rights, the young, alienated sweepers became victims of moral degeneration, a condition only found in Blake's modern society. Abuse of the youth's innocence
Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper "s Romanticism was an intellectual, literary, and artistic movement that took place during the second half of the eighteenth century. William Blake, an English poet, painter, and printmaker, explores opposing views in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, his collection of poems that juxtaposes what he considers to be innocent perspectives against the perspectives of those who have been exposed to the cruelties of life.
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