Thursday, March 26, 2020

Blake, the poet who cared

"Blake's two chimney sweepers"

"In the last line of the poem, he implies that the church profits from the miserable life that he leads and therefore ‘make[s] up a heaven of our misery’. This suggests that organised religion is built upon innocent pain. It also suggests that the church weaves a fiction of happiness, pretending that children like the sweep are satisfied instead of suffering. The sin of organised religion, as Blake sees it, is to prevent people from seeing things as they are by training them in the fallacy of received wisdom. So Blake implies that social problems are intimately connected with spiritual problems."

~ L. Freedman

Blake's two chimney sweepers - The British Library

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/blakes-two-chimney-sweepers

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