William Blake London
Blake’s London belongs to the collection Songs of Experience published in 1794. The
subject is the sorrowful condition of Londoners and the devastating effects of the
corruption of the city at Blake’s times.
The speaker wanders through the streets of London at night. .He notices despair in
the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. He
sees the streets chartered, that is to say hired for a specific use, and, as he passes
by the Thames, he points out that even the river is chartered . In fact ,trading licenses
are now given only to people who pay for it , so the river has lost its feature of being
free, free to flow. ( Charters were granted to powerful people to control the streets of
London and even the river)
On the whole, the repetition of the word “chartered” suggests a society dominated by
commercial profit where even nature is controlled by economic interest.
The poem is divided into 4 quatrains , with alternate lines rhyming ( ABAB rhyme
scheme). Repetition is the most striking feature. The initial repetition of the word
chartered and of the word mark in the next two lines reinforces the sense of
restriction and exploitation the speaker feels when entering the city.
The poem is remarkable for its auditory and visual power. While in the first
stanza the poet sees pain and weakness in people’s faces, in the second stanza he
hears the cry of desperation, the cry of pain and the fear of men and infants. Blake
uses the device of alliteration ( weaknes, woe ) and the word choice to set the
mournful atmosphere of the poem.
This crescendo of accumulating suffering reaches the climax of despair in the
powerful metaphor of mind-forg’d manacles. The poet can hear the sound of
mind-forg’d manacles, the manacles created by the mind of man , in every sound.
They can be identified with religious, political institutions and marriage laws which
oppress man depriving him of the innocence and happiness of childhood. It is reason
which creates the manacles, that is to say reason creates those institutions which
oppress man.. The repetition of the word every, thudding and oppressive, and the
inversion of the word order (the mind-forg’d manacles I hear) give more
emphasis to the whole stanza reinforcing the sense of violence and sorrow . Moreover,
the presence of harsh consonants (K) and long vowels and the predominant
lexical set of violence, sorrow and exploitation underline men’s condition of
suffering and pain. The colours implicitly mentioned are red and black and are
associated with blood and death.
In the third and fourth stanzas the people exploited by society appear : the
chimney-sweeper, the soldier and the harlot. They are known only through the traces
they leave behind ( SYNECHDOCHE) : the cries of the chimney sweeper (victim of the
blackening church, religious institution, who has lost its charitable spirit and is
corrupt) , the sigh of the soldier whose blood runs down the palace walls (victim of
the political power which demands his death in war), the harlot’s curse (driven to
prostitution by the lack of jobs). The acrostic form of the word HEAR in stanza 3 ,
echoed by “hear” at the close of line 8 and 13 , calls for attention.
The poem climaxes at the moment when the cycle of misery begins in the form of a
new born baby ( the new-born Infant): a baby is born into poverty to a syphilitic
mother.
Marital union, the place of possible regeneration and rebirth, is tainted by the blight of
venereal disease which affected prostitutes and was then transmitted inside marriage
as a result of debased sexual behaviour.
