In The Chimney Sweep, William Blake portrays the lack of innocence in the lives of these young boys as they are expected to have achieved the experience to carry out such unjust deeds. The narrator of the poem begins by letting us know that after his mother died, his father abandoned him to be a chimney sweep so he could get money. These two figures, his mother and father, are who children should depend on and look to for guidance. He feels abandoned because his mother left and his father abandoned him for money, this shows how poor his family was and how his father would do anything for a chance at a better life whether it included his son or not . The speaker also says that he became a street cleaner when he had just learned to speak, we know this from lines two and three. He then learned to sweep chimneys and live with being unsanitary (covered in soot). He also says that he sweeps up the soot and even sleeps in it; this is metaphorical because work covers them in soot every day and he is so often near fireplaces that he literally sleeps in the soot....