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What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name
—William Blake
Pleasure was ensnared in a web of domination, accumulation, abjection, resignation, and possibility. It was nothing if not cunning, mercurial, treacherous, and indifferently complicit with quite divergent desires and aspirations, ranging from the instrumental aims of slave-owner designs for mastery to the promise and possibility of releasing or redressing the pained constraints of the captive body.
—Saidiya V. Hartman
This essay represents my effort to come to terms with a single line in William Blake's 1794 song of experience "The Chimney Sweeper," one of the most well-known early Romantic poems of social and political protest. This fame, I suggest, has come at the expense of a nuanced understanding of one particularly strange line that complicates any straightforward reading of the poem according to the familiar, liberal rules of sentimental humanitarianism. Here is the poem in full:
A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.1
In three stanzas, Blake shifts speaker and tense, beginning in the voice of the adult observer who finds the "little black thing" and ending by giving the thing a voice. Though it begins by addressing an inanimate thing, most of this poem details how the black thing becomes animated and speaks back—and with force, indicting not only his neglectful parents but also the powerful triumvirate "God & his Priest & King" who, despite all the praise and authority bestowed upon them, "make up a heaven of our misery."2 Blake's use of the phrase "make up" here, with its ambiguous sense of both creation and deceit, suggests that collective suffering is neither natural nor inevitable. It is, rather, manufactured, to use the pointed formulation of Blake's...