William Blake’s ‘London’ in the AQA Anthology (Place) presents a capital city tainted by corruption and despair. It seems a soulless, lost place where moral degeneracy reigns everywhere. There is no moral compass to protect and guide except for the voice of the poet who is both observer and censor.
The poet gives the reader a highly compressed reading of this fallen, hellish place where relationships are ruinous and contaminating in both physical and spiritual ways.
The reader feels suffocated, disorientated; as ‘lost’ as those the poet describes. Ironically although the poet has the leisure and opportunity to wander about London’s diseased streets, its inhabitants are imprisoned by poverty and depravity.
Look at the sensory overwhelm evoked by the poet’s choice of language.The senses that are used all serve to accentuate the deadly claustrophobia of this hellish city.
For example: we listen to the cries of those suffering unimaginable fates and ‘see’ the gory details of their all too brief and finite lives.
Like Dickens who wrote after Blake, London is a place of abjection and fear. The vulnerable are preyed upon by predatory individuals as well as the ‘state’ machine.
The poem is witnessed by an ‘I/eye’ whose viewpoint creates the poem with its dramatically intense and disturbing lexis.
There is no glimpse of the freshness, the celebratory awe communicated in Wordsworth’s contrasting homage to London in ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’. In Wordsworth’s poem, the city is awakening and the poem applauds this daily rebirth or recreation through the eyes of a receptive, positively responsive poet’s eye.
By contrast, Blake communicates the abject journey he encounters as he ‘wanders’ through a city blighted by inhumanity and licentiousness.
Worth Thinking about.
Think about the contrast between the poet’s freedom to ‘wander’ the streets of this foul, diseased capital city and the hellish claustrophobia of the inhabitants of Blake’s ‘London’ who have no choice but to remain in this death’s waiting room.
If the poem is relentlessly miserable and negative about London and what it represents, then is Blake suggesting that capitalism creates heartless, fallen societies where the individual without economic power is doomed to destruction?
Stanza one.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Note the use of the first person narrator, the I’ whose ‘eye’ delivers up the poem to the reader. The poet is expressing a personal, ‘subjective’ point of view.
We can sense the emotional reactions throughout the poem as the poet gives powerful representation to his feelings about the city of London and what it stands for. The resonance of his word choices (lexis) gives the reader insight into Blake’s reading of this dark and unforgiving world.
For example, look at the verb ‘wander’. Think about its implications both for the poet and for the place he is exploring.
Does ‘wander’ suggest freedom and leisure? Is the poet economically and socially free and therefore able to reflect on an environment from comparative safety.
Blake is not symbolically chained by circumstance or manacled mentally or sexually unlike those he witnesses about him
The verb wander may also suggest the all enveloping horror of London, as no matter where the poet goes, the terrible sights remain before him and therefore before the reader too, as we ‘wander’ through the poem?
London is a sinister labyrinth for those who dwell there.
Why does Blake repeat the word ‘charter’d’? What does this suggest about the type of licence/freedom, produced by ownership and slavery engendering corruption?
Who governs this nightmarish city?
Think also about the ideas of ‘mapping’ or ‘orientation’.
Why do human beings allow such places to exist and even to thrive with their ghastly, ‘charter’d’ ways? If ‘charter’d implies ownership, then what are the effects of owning human beings? What are the implications of such inhumanity?
Remember The French revolution had recently taken place and Blake’s poem reveals the desperate social and economic inequalities that had inspired and produced the revolution.
Perhaps there is a powerful use of irony at work here,. For although the city and its river may be ‘charter’d’ the poet finds that he is very much uncharter’d or ‘lost’ by the experience.
And if the Thames is a polluted, negative force in London’s life and livelihood, ( for the Thames is the metaphorical heart of the city) does this suggest that the HEART of London is rotten too?
Blake’s poem also uses repetition to create a hypnotic rhythm to his poem, like the flow of the river and the movement of a busy city.
As readers, it is almost as if we are being hypnotised by the sound of the poem, carried deeper and deeper into its heartless world.
When Blake repeats the word ‘mark’ then this seems linked to some malignant disease,or may be even a biblical reference like the ‘mark of Cain’ where one brother betrays through murder.
The ‘marks’ on all the members of the community are a blight on the society of which they are all are members . They are signs of disease, poverty and suffering.
Terrible ‘stigmata’ in a way, ironically signifying despair and prevalent illness.
Look how Blake manipulates the ironic rhyme between ‘woe’ and ‘flow’ . The flowing water is not the stagnant Thames, but one of the more universal expressions of suffering, tears.
This analysis will continue in another blog.
Other poems of Place can be found here and here and here!.
( Further Thoughts(2014)
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.
In the second stanza Blake shifts the focus(and locus) of our perception. We are now overwhelmed by the AURAL sense, by the hellish nightmare of London’s nightmarish chorus of suffering.
The repetition of the word ‘every’ renders London a Dante-esque place of horror.
There is no place or sense whee we can find refuge. Sanctuary is not even available to us through the mind, through an ability to ‘go inside’ our heads and shut out the horror.
Instead we find the voices inside and without: Our own ‘mind forg’d manacles‘ of mental, physical and spiritual torment!
