Here is "THE Chimney Sweeper," as opposed to "The Chimney Sweeper" of Innocence. With the emphatic singularity of its title, engraved in Blake's flowing uncils rather than the roman lettering of the earlier poem, Blake signifies the limiting particularities of experience hemmed in by family, by church, and by the state.
Without the title and the illustration at the base of the plate, we'd have no way of knowing that the poem is "about" a chimney sweeper. The poem is bracketed by the two; or better yet, enveloped by them: wisps of smoke define the print's margins and twist into the title's lettering. Between them lies the text, and from the low pall of soot falls a kinetic shaft of pelting snow--of frozen rime, we could say; it being, after all, a London winter. (One's reminded of Wordsworth's vision of London from Hampstead Heath in "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg," a poem that cut like a meteor across the long gloaming of his career: "Our haughty lives are crowned with darkness, / Like London with its own black wreath.")
The "little black thing" is hardly more differentiated than a starling, its cry of "weep, weep" the barest human articulation. And yet we know that already "[s]weep, [s]weep" marks the site of commodification, a process that obtrudes on the earliest aspect of language acquisition. Take the infant's "weep, weep" as Ur-etymon--the primal utterance from which the whole of language exfoliates--and you have a creature whose introduction into the world of experience is a base enfranchisement: he cannot but announce that he's for sale.
So what happened to that elided s? Critics have pointed to the "Cockney lisp." (And if indeed a Cockney is one who picks up the language within hearing of the bells of St. Paul's, there's a lot that could be made of it, in light of Blake's idiosyncratic Dissension.)
What happened to the repressed s? It returns forcefully with the emphatic "say?": "Where are thy father & mother? say?" It's been noted (by Erdman) that Blake's question marks sometimes shade doubtfully into exclamation points--"shriek marks" or "bangs," in the old typographer's lingo. Though here we have an indubitable question mark, the "say?" is as close to an imperative as an interrogative can come: say!
The child's answer, "They are both gone up to the church to pray[,]" is straight forward, almost a catechized response, but the "say?" triggers two stanzas of response that show the depth of the child-sweeper's immersion in the world of experience, and his awkward but precise awareness that there is no redemptive element within it.