In the poem “The Angel” by William Blake, the speaker describes a dream where he is a maiden guarded by an angel. The angel comforts her while she cries over her love for the angel, unknown to him because she says she “hid from him my hearts delight” on line eight. The angel then leaves and the maiden collects herself, arming her fears “with ten thousand shields and spears” on line twelve. The arming of her fears means she is giving her fears power, which distances herself from the angel. By the end of the poem the Angel comes back “in vain” on line fourteen because he sees how old she’s grown. What she feared; growing old and remaining unmarried, gives her something to fend the angel off with, whether she wants to or not. Blake’s drawings change the depiction of the poem through the way he colors the maiden, the angel, and the background. Some maidens look younger like the maiden depicted at the beginning of the poem, and some maidens look older like the maiden depicted at the end of the poem. For example, Copy T shows the maiden with golden hair and red hues in her face that make her look younger. Copy L shows the maiden with grey hair, making her look older. This copy also has a sky painted like the morning scene in the third stanza with red hues. Archives change the way we read poems because they allows us to see the artist’s creative process and uncover different meanings to poems depending on how the artist chooses to represent the poem. Archives allow us to see multiple forms of the same poem at once and create a community where we can talk about their different meanings.
William Blake
“The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Experience)
The Songs of Experience version of William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” more blatantly points out the horrors that came with being a chimney sweeper during the late 18th century. The profession was extremely dangerous, and almost always employed young boys because they would fit inside the chimneys. In this poem, the companion to the Songs of Innocence poem by the same title, Blake argues that parents and the church completely ignore the terrible conditions that these boys had to deal with, because they are devoting all of their attention to praising God.
First, the parents/church start the boy at work as a chimney sweeper because he is happy being outside in the snow. Then, once he starts the job, they believe that since the boy acts happy, he is completely fine, while he is actually singing the “notes of woe” (9).
The boy narrates this poem, and in the first line he refers to himself as “A little black thing among the snow.” This immediately depicts the boy’s view of himself: nameless, useless, hurt. Additionally, the “clothes of death” (8) that Blake refers to later in the poem are supposed to be the chimney sweeper uniform. The entire poem basically shows how the boys felt when they were forced into dangerous environments and entirely neglected by all of the adult figures in their life, because they were so concentrated on getting into Heaven. In the end of the poem, the boy says that these people ” praise God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery” (12-13). While the word “heaven” usually has a positive connotation, the boy is stating that since church is taking the focus off of the horrible conditions of the chimney sweeping profession, the adults’ “heaven” is actually the sweepers’ place of despair.
The engravings of this text significantly add to its emotional impact. In the images, the boy is walking in the snow to his job. Most of the engravings look messy and dirty, which immediately made me think of sadness and gloom (and of course chimney sweeping). I think Copy N and Copy T illustrate the poem best, because the boy almost blends into the background, and the pictures look like someone just threw soot all over them. The images definitely succeed in evoking feelings of grief and sympathy that add to the emotions from the text.