Diction and Imagery in Blake's "The Chimney Sweep" Children are now welcomed to earth like presents wrapped in pink and blue. In the 1800s, children were treated like workers from the womb. Children trained from an early age to carry out unbearable tasks (ward 3). Imagine what it felt like to be unwanted by a parent and sold to a master who cared nothing about them. Many children earned some money by becoming chimney sweeps or working on the streets running errands, calling taxis, sweeping streets, selling toys or flowers, and helping market porters (Ward 3). Little children didn't have much choice in the job (life) they wanted, but sweeping chimneys was by far the most dangerous thing. Children were forced into confined areas filled with cobwebs, where they sacrificed their lives to clean. William Blake does an excellent job of describing the hardships of children in the 1800s in "The Chimney Sweep" through the use of diction and imagery. Starting with the first verse, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. Use words like dead, cry, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child tells us about his family, stating the death of his mother and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father told me sold while still my tongue” (Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child being thrown into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “cry” instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could hardly cry cry cry cry cry” (3). The fact that the child cried “cry” instead of sweeping proves that he could not have been more than four years old. Blake describes them sleeping in soot, which also means they are sleeping on their deathbed. The average lifespan of children working in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh working environment. The child portrays the pain in the last line of the first stanza "So I sweep your chimneys and sleep in the soot." (4) In the second stanza a name “Tom Dacre” is given which is used to show the realism of the event described in the poem. The second stanza contains the only simile in this poem, "That curl like a lamb's back" (6), which symbolizes the lamb as innocence and when they shave the child's head it is as if they are taking away his innocence.