London 🏙️

• William: 'Bake London'
• Poem structure

  • Written in quatrains (4 line stanzas)
  • Has a regular rhyme scheme
  • Childlike in its simplicity
  • Political poem to get a point across
  • Written in a memorable way so even children can remember it
• Romantic poet


  Wanders around the city
• Blake is complaining about urbanisation


  Destroying what was once natural
• "Charters" in the poem suggests that everything in the city is owned
• The "charters" and "streets"

  Make people poorer and can no longer enjoy the freedom they once had
• The speaker says "I wander" which shows he can still be free and wander like him if we start to look at the land in a different way
• "Manacles"


  Metaphor for oppression or imprisonment
• The idea that we have a social hierarchy is not real, it only works because the people at the bottom respect the people at the top, and it is just a construct made up in our minds
• If we stop believing in the hierarchy, we can live free lives
• "Forg'd" is a metaphorical reference to our belief in hierarchy being a fake way of looking at life
• The poem tries to show us a better way so we can take off the manacles that are preventing us from being free
• Themes

  -human power

  -corruption

  • oppression