Speaker and characters

In “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake from “Songs of Innocence” we can identify several characters: the speaker or the narrator, the speaker’s father, Tom Dacre, other chimney boys, an Angel and God. Out of these characters, the most relevant are the speaker and Tom Dacre, as the rest of them are mostly symbolic, illustrating ideas or categories.

The speaker

The speaker of the poem functions as a sort of narrator and describes himself in the first stanza as a chimney sweeper whose mother has died while he was an infant and whose father has sold him into work:

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. (ll. 1-4)

Notice also that the chimney boy seems to address his adult clients or the employers through “your chimneys” which suggests the intended recipients of the poem are those who are partially responsible for child labour, the employers and the ch...