In the Poems “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” by William Blake, the author indirectly explores the human living conditions. William Blake is considered as a humanitarian, and he often makes allusions in his poems criticizing some society trends like child label. In his “Song of innocence and Experience”, Blake shows in the Chimney Sweeper (SI), the Chimney Sweeper (SE), or the Little Black Boy (SI), how bitter can reality be.

In the Chimney Sweeper (SE), Wordsworth points how miserable the working life of children is. Commonly taken away from their homes to be used as a mop to clean chimneys, those children are portrait as objects in the poem by William Blake. The author begins the poem by describing them as “a little black thing among the snow” (Chimney S, SE l .1). Taking the word thing into account, it is clear that those children were treated miserably. Blake also criticizes the parents decisions, who thinks “they have done no injury” (Chimney S, SE l. 10) to their children by sending them to work. The parents think they are giving an opportunity to their children to go up in life. However, the little chimney sweeper says that their parents “clothed him in the clothes of death” (Chimney S, SE l. 7), since the fate of those children is to die at an early age, considering the bad working conditions. In the case of this poem, the children are aware of their fate, it is a song of experience.

William Blake shows the naivety of children by revealing some of their thoughts about their future in the Chimney Sweeper (SI). In contrast with the last discussed Chimney Sweeper poem, this second one is a Song of Innocence poem, and therefore, it shows the children taking the work lightly with hope for a better future. Wordsworth makes it so that for the children their lives are justified. For example, if “Tom Dacre [cried] when his head that curl’d like a lamb’s back, was shaved” (Chimney S, SI l. 5-6) it is a good thing, because he knows “the soot cannot spoil [his] hair” (Chimney S, SI l. 8). This passage tells the reader that the children try to see the good side of bad things, like one having his head shaved to improve his working functionality. Once again, the working conditions are horrible, and the one who own those children are clearly profiting on their naivety to use them for greed. Later on, the narrator says that all those children are “lock’d up in coffins of black” (Chimney S, SI l. 12), where the coffin is a metaphor for the chimneys and a forecasting of their deaths. Those children are trapped with this final destination, and are not able to see. Inexperienced for the real world, the children believe that “an Angel who [has] a bright key” (Chimney S, SI l. 13) will come and set them free. So, they just work blindly and “need not fear harm” (Chimney S, S l. 24). The author tries to show the reader that child label brings no future.

The Little Black Boy is a poem where William Blake takes a position against racism. The author presents black boys as inferior as white boys