The Poet 193
Compassion, courage, and erotic life have all fallen to disease in
Blake’s world. So too has intellection: men and women are not ele-
vated by the culture’s supposed thinkers. According to Blake, men
like Hobbes and Locke are enemies of true thought; they create the
“mind- forg’d manacles.” The three great ideals of the ancient world
are dead in Blake’s London. But though the tone of Blake’s poem is
angry and impatient, its spirit is hopeful. Blake shows us where to
look— those children, those soldiers, the prostitute on the street—
to visit clarifying judgment on ourselves. But he also shows us the
way to renewal: that way is through love and through the exercise
of a poetic imagination that never gives up on itself or on the respon-
sive powers of other men and women, who on some level always
want to be freed from the prison of Self.
But what, precisely, are the dynamics of that liberation? How
does an individual—or a society— that desires to throw off Self hood
proceed? How does the Romantic imagination, or at least Blake’s
Romantic imagination, move from the State of Selfhood to the
State of Soul? The Romantic quest for the Soul, at least in Blake,
is the pro cess by which the imagination discloses the forms of
current- day error, then burns through them to a version of libera-
tion or paradise.
In “London” and the other salient poems in Songs of Innocence
and of Experience Blake focuses on disclosing the reigning forms of
error, which are, perhaps, much like our own.
In “The Chimney Sweep,” perhaps the most piercing of the Songs
after “London,” Blake unfolds the complexly devious terms of the
Self hood’s domination. The poem dramatizes what one might call
the compassion of the Self. The narrator of the poem is a young
chimney sweep sold into the sweepers’ slavery when he was very
young: “while yet my tongue, / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep
weep,” he says. “So your chimney I sweep & in soot I sleep” (10).
The narrator, Camille Paglia and others have observed, is trying to