The speaker of this poem is a small boy who was sold into the chimney-sweeping business when his mother died. He recounts the story of a fellow chimney sweeper, Tom Dacre, who cried when his hair was shaved to prevent vermin and soot from infesting it. The speaker comforts Tom, who falls asleep and has a dream or vision of several chimney sweepers all locked in black coffins. An angel arrives with a special key that opens the locks on the coffins and sets the children free. The newly freed children run through a green field and wash themselves in a river, coming out clean and white in the bright sun. The angel tells Tom that if he is a good boy, he will have this paradise for his own. When Tom awakens, he and the speaker gather their tools and head out to work, somewhat comforted that their lives will one day improve.

Analysis
“The Chimney Sweeper” comprises six quatrains, each following the AABB rhyme scheme, with two rhyming couplets per quatrain. The first stanza introduces the speaker, a young boy who has been forced by circumstances into the hazardous occupation of chimney sweeper. The second stanza introduces Tom Dacre, a fellow chimney sweep who acts as a foil to the speaker. Tom is upset about his lot in life, so the speaker comforts him until he falls asleep. The next three stanzas recount Tom Dacre's somewhat apocalyptic dream of the chimney sweepers’ “heaven.” However, the final stanza finds Tom waking up the following morning, with him and the speaker still trapped in their dangerous line of work.
There is a hint of criticism here in Tom Dacre's dream and in the boys' subsequent actions, however. Blake decries the use of promised future happiness as a way of subduing the oppressed. The boys carry on with their terrible, probably fatal work because of their hope in a future where their circumstances will be set right. This same promise was often used by those in power to maintain the status quo so that workers and the weak would not unite to stand against the inhuman conditions forced upon them. As becomes more clear in Blake's Songs of Experience, the poet had little patience with palliative measures that did nothing to alter the present suffering of impoverished families.
What on the surface appears to be a condescending moral to lazy boys is in fact a sharp criticism of a culture that would perpetuate the inhuman conditions of chimney sweeping on children. Tom Dacre (whose name may derive from “Tom Dark,” reflecting the sooty countenance of most chimney sweeps) is comforted by the promise of a future outside the “coffin” that is his life’s lot. Clearly, his present state is terrible and only made bearable by the two-edged hope of a happy afterlife following a quick death.
Blake here critiques not just the deplorable conditions of the children sold into chimney sweeping, but also the society, and particularly its religious aspect, that would offer these children palliatives rather than aid. That the speaker and Tom Dacre get up from the vision to head back into their dangerous drudgery suggests that these children cannot help themselves, so it is left to responsible, sensitive adults to do something for them.

Rape is bad, but not being able to go to church? Now that's a sin. Under slavery, religion becomes an instrument of evil. She reminds us that slaveholders tried to use religion to keep their slaves in check. After Nat Turner’s insurrection, the elite whites hire a free black man to deliver sermons to their slaves on the importance of being obedient. Jacobs aimed her anti-slavery message in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at northern Christian women, so it was important for her to show slavery makes heathens out of black people. Maybe, she suggests, white women could spend more time abolishing slavery and less time funding foreign missions.
One has to wonder at the kind of Christianity that would allow someone to beat a human being until the skin comes off their back and leaves the blood and gore behind as grim reminders of that beating. One wonders more at the mindset of those same so-called Christians that insist slaves attend church on the one hand, but forbid them from singing certain spirituals on the other – for fear they are somehow referring to escape or talking negatively about their masters.

One would think that if you wanted someone to truly learn about God, and Christ’s message that you would want them to learn to read as soon as possible. You would perhaps even give them a bible to practice reading as is done widely now by missionaries in the field.

It would be a welcome sign of understanding to see the people that you teach singing spirituals and incorporating Christian faith into their daily lives. This was clearly not the case during slavery.

For many it was a weapon used to keep blacks in line, it was put on for show and not in reality or in practice. Families were destroyed, lives were lost and the same people went to church every Sunday and professed to be the best of Christians. Then during the week they made the lives of countless slaves a living hell. There are numerous instances of the lack of regard of family structure in Harriet Jacobs’s book. Her not being able to see her father when he died is one. The “master” trying to sell Aunt Marthy is another. The acceptance of the slave owner cohabiting with his slaves while married is another. This evidenced by the light , fair skinned babies that were commonplace on most plantations. The lack of Christian compassion shown during this time period is marked the Curse of Cain, was one way to justify mistreating one’s fellow man(even though they were black).

It is no lesser ironic that out of the mistreatment shown to slaves and free blacks that the African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded by a black man, Richard Allen – after being denied the right to worship alongside the very whites that “wanted” slaves to get some religion and that to this day this is one of the largest denominations internationally and that they have themselves taken on mission work and ministering to those in far reaches and countries with however a notable difference in the consideration for the cultural differences of the places they visit and the traditions of the people they are trying to teach.

In fact you could say the lesson learned from the ironies visited upon the slaves was the RIGHT way to go about spreading the good news and to be INCLUSIVE as opposed to divisive. At least one can but hope from the work that has been done and that is still going on in the AME church and its outreach and mission work.