Certain poems in Songs of Innocence contain a darker tone that foreshadows, or predicts, the arrival of a more experienced perspective. .
An example of the contrary state of the human soul' can be found in the two versions of The Chimney Sweeper'. Its seeming endorsement of the social conditions which allowed children to be used as sweeps, and thus its apparent contradiction of Blake's known opposition to the trade in children makes it something of a paradox. On the simplest level however, it does hold out to those who do their duty' the hope of release and joy, even though this happiness is deferred to the future, leaving the present unchanged. Tom is also promised that he'd have God for his father, and never want joy'. This hope and promise, flimsy and even unhelpful though they may be, contrast with the complete lack of comfort offered in Experience's version. Here the sweep's unfeeling sanctimonious parents have clothed him in the clothes of death and taught him to sing the notes of woe. Religion is seen to be firmly on the side of the parents who are both gone up to the church to pray'. God himself is implicated in the child's condition " God and his priest and king, Who make up a heaven of our misery. - Effectively God is transformed from father to oppressor.
In Blake's time, poor parents often sold their children as 'climbing boys' to a master sweep at around the age of five. The boys were forced up narrow, winding chimneys to clean them of soot. Some suffocated inside the chimneys they were trying to clean; others grew up stunted and deformed, dying at a young age from cancer or lung diseases. Tom Dacre's dream shows just how horrible this life was for the boys by contrasting it with what they should have been doing at this tender stage in their lives: 'leaping' and 'laughing' in the sunshine. .
In the Songs of Experience version, the narrator introduces the boy chimney sweep as no more than a 'little black thing'.
