soot-covered filth. They would suffer from falls, suffocation, burns, and lung diseases caused by breathing in the soot. Sometimes they would become trapped in the chimneys and die there. Because of this terrible existence, Tom's dream of an angel taking him to a clean, peaceful, heavenly place touches him profoundly.

In the poem, Blake does not directly state that the speaker, or narrator, cries. When the narrator says that when his father sold him as a chimney sweep he "could scarcely cry 'weep," he is not referring to weeping tears. You can tell this from the apostrophe before the word "'weep." He is saying that he was so young when he became a chimney sweeper that he could not say the word "sweep" but instead would refer to himself as a "'weep." We can certainly infer, though, that the narrator must have sometimes cried because his mother died when he was very young and his father cruelly sold him into a life of hard labor.

The narrator does say that Tom, the other chimney sweeper referred to in the story, does cry for a specific reason. Tom cries because when he becomes a chimney sweeper, all the hair of his head is shaved off. The narrator reassures Tom that it is better that he loses his hair because then it won't get dirty with soot. The hair of chimney sweepers was also shaved so that it would not burn in the hot chimneys and so it would not breed lice.