In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
Consider the use and effect of the repetition in this stanza.
Why does the poet keep repeating the adjective ‘every’ and how does this repetition intensify the horror of the events observed by the wandering poet?
Do we feel a sense of suffocation as the poet envelops us in suffering?
Notice the use of capitalisation for ‘man’ and infant’. What is the purpose of this capitalisation?
Does it universalise suffering through making it ubiquitous?
Consider the way that the poet varies the sensory impressions in this stanza. How many senses are deployed here?
Does this variation make the reader feel utterly trapped?
And if so, does this sense of entrapment make the final line of the stanza dramatic and psychologically inevitable?
What do you think these ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ might be?
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
Here the sounds of suffering haunt even the places where sanctuary and healing may be expected to reside.
Indeed the church appears to collude with those who employ chimney-sweepers who were small children often starved to death in order to fulfil their terrifying and squalid duties of work.
The poem is haunted by the very real spectre of the French revolution(1789) and here we can discern Blake’s sympathy with the revolutionaries in France as he offers us the image of futility through the ‘hapless ‘ figures of the soldiers as opposed to their possible liberation through rebellion as seen in France.
The gaps between rich and poor seem huge and compassion is cruelly absent from the world described so vividly here in the poem.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
We might hope that the ‘youthful Harlot’s curse’ would turn out to be an oxymoron. Yet this poem shows us that it is not an oxymoron. Child prostitution was rife in London at this time. Innocence was not protected nor respected.
The terrible sounds of the city are vividly evoked here. The use of sensory impressions makes the poem morally awkward and disturbing.
The cries of the new born reminds us that Shakespeare’s Macbethwas right, we should cry that we are born to the world of ‘fools’. birth just carries on repeating the tragic cycle of destruction and sexual degeneracy.
The final line contains a disturbing social missile of an oxymoron. For the institution of ‘marriage’ supposedly sacred and socialy respectable is nothing more than a ‘hearse’, a vehicle of death, trasnporting the dead from this world to the next.
Why is marraige a ‘hearse’ then?
Marriage is a hearse as promiscuous husbands would infect wives with venereal disease from consorting with prosititutes.
Infections would be passed on and familes could all succumb to the madness and eventaul fatality of venereal disease.
You only have to think of Ibsen’s later play, Ghosts to see this terrible legacy or inheritance vividly dramatised.
