5 - Power

Summary

I want to begin this discussion of the question of power in Blake's work by reading the two “Chimney Sweeper” plates from Songs of Innocence and of Experience in relationship to one another. What we will find in the juxtaposition of the two “Chimney Sweeper” texts is an invitation to think through the question of the relationship of power to narrative and textuality, and, through that, the larger question of social power and how one can start imagining possibilities of resistance to it. What I propose in this chapter is that Blake, in his work, pushes us to think through how power operates on a variety of different – and yet interlocking or overlapping – scales. And hence his work also prompts us to question how power can be contested or resisted all along those different scales. Part of what is at stake here is how we understand the role of reading and interpretation in either the distribution or the containment of power. Although power can of course operate through brute strength, it is generally far more efficient, and can be invisible or inscrutable, when it operates more subtly, for instance, by helping to form our thoughts or define the contours of our interpretive universe, filling in, as it were, the blanks of our own thoughts even as we are in the process of thinking them.

Let's turn to the “Chimney Sweeper” of Songs of Innocence first to see Blake's approach to the question of power.

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.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curl'd like a lambs back was shav'd, so I said,

Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.