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A person is affected by life occurrences differently as a child than as an adult. Childhood is a period of life every person experiences, and therefore can relate to. In the following four poems the poet attempts to stir feelings and emotions about childhood in the reader. In each poem the child has to or has lived through something horrible. In “The Chimney Sweeper,” the child has been sold to the city to be a chimney sweep and has to cope with the fact that he will probably die a child chimney sweep. In “My Papa’s Waltz,” a child deals with an alcoholic, controlling father. The boy in “The Whipping,” has a mother who abuses him as a release for the pain life has caused her. “On The Death of Friends in Childhood,” a grown man looks back, and attempts to shed light on the tragedy of the death of his friends while he was a boy. As far as the tone of these four poems is concerned, all are very serious poems and that can be sensed in the under layer of the poems. In the “The Chimney Sweeper,” William Blake uses irony. The tone seems carefree and the poem flows smoothly like a nursery rhyme, however the poem is about something horrible and sick; the death and abuse of children through brutal child labor. “The