I came across William Blakes poem, “The Chimney Sweeper,” in Suzanne U. Clark’s book, The Roar on the Other Side: A Guide for Student Poets. She teaches, “Blake wanted to protest the cruel treatment suffered by young boys in the eighteenth century who were sometimes sold for labor by their impoverished parents. The speaker of the poem is a lad who was sold at a young age to a master sweeper. He tries to comfort the newest recruit, a child named Tom Dacre.” Here is Blake’s poem,
There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,
“Hush, Tom! Never mind it, for when your head’s bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.
When I read Blakes’ poem, I lingered long on the potent statement he so artfully left unsaid: Tom Dacre did not cry over the loss of his hair, but the loss of his mother. I imagined the lad standing beside my chair dressed like a Dickens character. Chin down, hands clasped under his belly. Abashed and bashful, insecure yet guarded. An orphan wanting love but not daring to hope for it. And I cried for him. Then I pictured my response to his downturned lip and shy upward glances,
Tom Dacre, I want to love you.
To stroke your lamb’s back hair. And invite you to sit with me here in my chair. I’ll lean to my shelf and pick out a book. At funny adventurous stories we’ll look. We’ll point at the pictures and repeat the rhymes, Then I’ll ask you a question as if you were mine. You’ll peer at me queerly and wary to feel The way that you would if you knew I were real.
Tom Dacre, you lived a long long time ago. You grew old and your shorn hair turned white as the snow. Can’t I come in your boyhood, a guest in your dream, To hold you and hear you and beloved you deem?
Tom Dacre, I love you and though we’ll ne’er meet, I can lift still another child into my seat.
-Mrs. Heather
