london

• London

  William Blake

  SUMMARY

  • Presents a bleak & despairing picture of the city

  • Foresees a world of people engaged in endless toil at the mercy of the Industrial Revolution

  • Calling on the masses to break the cycle oppression & violence that plagues the lower & working classes

  • Challenges the repressive role of the monarchy, church & gov
• CONTEXT

  • Written (1792) during french rev (89-95)
• Romanticist - believed spontaneous childhood play was the source of adult inspiration, but this killed by industrialisation

  • 1817, gov suspended Habeas Corpus - people could legally be held prisoner for an indefinite time with no justification - whilst other countries reforming, Britain regressing, threatening non-conformists
• 'I wander through each chartered street near where the chartered Thames does flow'

  • 1760-1820, approx 6 mil acres of land in London taken into priv ownership, enclosure acts passed. Charter was the legal proclamation of who owned what

  • 2nd more ironic - you cannot charter the Thames or else it will overflow - cannot charter the people or they will break free & find a way to conquer it. Presents human force as inferior to power of nature

  • Repetition gives overwhelming/inescapable sense of rigidity, constancy
• 'The mind-forged manacles I hear'

  • Manacles - hand & leg cuffs - society cuffed. Jean-Jaques Rousseau 'Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains'

  • Not trochaic (stressed syllable followed by unstressed) - 3 syllables stressed so a spondaic rhythm

  • 'Mind' - psychological entrapment

  • 'Forged' - violent, industrial action (hammering) gives a sense of relentless hammering of gov rule
• 'How the chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackening church appalls'

  • Exploitation of children - starved and chained together. Boys 4-7 sold into labour as chimney-sweepers, many suffocated, became deformed

  • 'Every' repeated 5 times - overwhelming, claustrophobia, sees oppression everywhere he looks

  • 'Blackening church' - darkness & corruption of of church - a dying institution, people didn't donate to help the unfortunate as 'God wanted them that way'
• 'And the hapless soldier's sigh Runs in blood down palace walls'

  • French rev - overthrew monarchy through extreme violence, 1/3 of all french people died, phrase 'blood was running down the walls' became popular

  • Adding 'Palace' suggests it is the monarchy and gov to blame. Barrier between rich & poor

  • First letters of each line in stanza read 'HEAR' - begging people in power to hear the cries, poverty, violence
• 'And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse

  • 'Blights' 'plagues' - like an infection, curse, damning society

  • Mariage-hearse (vehicle for transporting coffin) - sees marriage as a death sentence, no divorce.

  • Oxymoron - positive image of eternal love paired with image of death & damnation. Nature, something prosperous, being destroyed by urbanisation

  • Compound noun - binding together
• STRUCTURE

  • Iambic tetrameter (however broken in line 4 - false sense of comfort & security broken. Meter corrupted, represents dysfunctional society)

  • Quatrains

  • Pounding alternating rhyme scheme ABAB
• VOICE

  • The speaker is an observer who wanders the streets of London

  • Blake describing the present moment of 19th century London, encouraging people to take power into their own hands