‘Childhood is a time of freedom and happiness, children should retain their innocence into adulthood’ To what extent do you agree with this in regards to Blake’s representation of childhood?

Throughout Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake makes his opinions known that childhood innocence should be retained through to adulthood. Evidence for this lies especially in his ‘Introduction’ to Innocence, where ‘piping songs of pleasant glee’ an adult roams throughout meadows, as children do in many poems in the collection, such as the Nurse’s song, therefore his beliefs are made evident.

                 Perhaps the most prominent example of Blake’s view resides in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’. Within this poem, the children are forced into a life of adult experience prematurely which causes damage to the children. Blake first makes a direct display of the lives of the child sweepers by introducing the first three lines as very bleak; using a trochaic metre to emphasise the struggles of the little Tom Dacre ‘when my mother died I was very young’ the hard sounding syllables, compared with the rigid AA BB rhyme scheme evokes a sense of pity and hopelessness. They only experience freedom through dreams. ‘Leaping, Laughing they run’ through ‘the plain’ thanks to an angel that came to Tom Dacre in a dream, here Blake represents the innocence and perhaps naivety that is typical of childhood in different ways. Dacre ‘could scarcely cry weep weep’ when he was put to work, here Blake is showing the childhood innocence of Tom in the sense that he cannot express himself eloquently, which would perhaps help him out of the terrible situation he has been placed in, so here perhaps childhood innocence can be something that hinders the development into adulthood, but Tom had no freedom so the innocence was not fully expressed. Blake also contrasts the dark, dank imagery of the first three stanzas, that describe the ‘soot’ in which the children sleep, with green images of meadows, which symbolise fertility and new life, almost as if the children have been given a new lease of life by the angel; the life they deserve. Therefore showing that although childhood is not a time of freedom and happiness constantly, there are times where children can be liberated by their own innocence, and that freedom through liberation should be carried on into adulthood.