September 5, 2021

The Chimney Sweeper
By: William Blake (1794)

A little black thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe! Where are thy father & mother? say? They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, 5 And smil'd among the winters snow: They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy, & dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury: 10 And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King Who make up a heaven of our misery.

Bibliography

• Ackroyd, Peter (1995). Blake: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books.
• Battenhouse, Henry M. (1958). English Romantic Writers. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc.
• Bloom, Harold (2003). William Blake. Bloom’s Major Poets. New York: Chelsea House.
• Frye, Northrup (1947). Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Gardner, Stanley (1969). Blake. Literary Critiques. New York: Arco.
• Green, Martin Burgess (1972). Cities of Light and Sons of Morning. Boston: Little, Brown.
• Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Major Authors. 2 (Tenth ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.
• Makdisi, Saree (2003). "The Political Aesthetic of Blake's Images". In Eaves, Morris. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. pp. 110–132.
• — (2015). Reading William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Paulin, Tom (March 3, 2007). "The Invisible Worm". Guardian. Retrieved 2021-09-04.
• Thompson, E. P. (1993). Witness Against the Beast. New York: The New Press.
• Tomlinson, Alan (1987). Song of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. MacMillan Master Guides. London: MacMillan Education.
• Wolfson, Susan J. (2003). "Blake's Language in Poetic Form". In Eaves, Morris. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. pp. 63–83.

Links and Web Resources

• Blake at the Internet Archive.
• Blake’s Notebook at the British Museum.
• William Blake Study Questions