INTRODUCTION:
In this work we are going to analyse a William
Blake’s poem called London.
This poem shows William Blake’s view of London
during the 18th century and describes the hard life of the
inhabitants, specially those who belonged to the low social classes, that were
oppressed by the high classes. Through this poem London we can see how
the bureaucratic laws controlled this city.
LONDON:
I
wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does
flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In
every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in
every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How
the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless
soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But
most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's
curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the
marriage-hearse.
Viewed
on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_(poem)
When
we read this poem we can see that through this lines William Blake deals with
the difficult and the hard life in London at the 18th century.
William Blake makes a description of this city showing us how dirty the streets
and the Thames were; we can read this description in the first and the second
lines “…chartered street…chartered Thames…”.Another important point to
comment is the situation of the poor people who suffered because they had to
fight against the oppression of the high classes to obtain money. So, with this
poem William Blake wants to show the poverty and the bad circumstances of the
people who was living in London at the Romantic time.
The
Romantic Era was a time of great evolution, specially in industry. Passion, not
reason, ruled the daily life. The Romantic writers were free to write whatever
they felt, they wrote specially about the situation and the life of the common
people at this time. They wanted to express universal truth. There were a lot of
poets that accompanied their works with pictures. This poem London has a
painting make by William Blake that represents what the poem says.
(http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Image:Blake_London.jpg)
Romantics
not only represent their feelings through their writings, they also use art to
express that.
This
poem belongs to a group of poems written by William Blake called “Songs of
Innocence and Songs of Experience”, first published in 1794, and from the
section entitled “Songs of Experience”. (Bygrave, Stephen. Romantic
Writings. London, 1996. page 18)
“Songs
of Experience” were written when William Blake was an adult man and he denounced
how children were treated at his time. As a good romantic, Blake hate slavery
and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings
express a notion of universal humanity. This “Songs of Experience”, contrasting
with “Songs of Innocence”, deals with the loss of innocence after exposure to
the material world and all of its mortal sin during the adult life.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience)
Many
of the poems published in “Songs of Experience” have a corresponding poem in
“Songs of Innocence”, but the poem London don’t have this corresponding
poem. The poem reflects Blake’s extreme disillusionment with the suffering he
saw in London.(http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/London)
It
was a problem for many people to read his poems at his time because his thoughts
were different to the society’s thoughts. He denounced what many people didn’t
want to see or to denounce because of their fear. The time when Blake wrote his
poems was a time of darkness, specially for low classes of
society.
ANALYSIS
OF THE POEM:
“London”
London
is a poem divided in four stanzas. Each stanza has four verses. According to the
rhyme, all Blake’s poem uses an “A,B,A,B” rhyming pattern. Blake’s uses
assonance for example “flow”, “woe”; “man”, “ban”; “fear”, “hear”, etc. This
rhyming pattern is repeated in all the stanzas. Each stanza have an iambic
tetrameter.
The
title tells us that Blake is going to talk about an important city that is
London. The title also tells that William Blake is at street level, face to face
with the inhabitants of the city. (Bygrave, Stephen. Romantic Writings.
London, 1996. page 18.)
As
we have said before, the poem is divided in four stanzas which we are going to
explain one by one.
In
the first stanza
Blake is describing the city of London and its inhabitants. Everything in this
city, even the River Thames, is “chartered”. London is showed as a horrible
place where everyone live in fear and misery.
Every person he sees has “marks of
weakness, marks of woe”. Blake repeats the word “mark” to emphasize that
feeling, a feeling of suffering, showing how suffocating was the atmosphere of
the city. That repetition approaches the poem to the reader because this is as
if William Blake was talking directly to the reader, because when we talk with
someone, we repeat some words to make sure that the receiver of our message
hears what we said. That repetition can be an anaphora because the same word is
repeated at the beginning of successive clauses.
Blake
uses the first person “I” because he is giving his own opinion about the
situation of London. William Blake was living that situation from he was a child
because London was his native city and Blake had a daily contact with that
problem.
In
the second stanza
Blake centres his attention to the inhabitants of London. So, Blake emphasizes
the hard life of everyone with the repetition of “every” and “cry”, that could
be an exaggeration showing the negative feeling and the suffocating situation
that people lived. We can see that here Blake is repeating the same word “every”
at the beginning of successive clauses and this is called
anaphora.
Blake
talks about the situation of society from children to men saying that everyone
is crying, not only children.
Here
Blake uses the first person “I” to say that he can hear all these crying and,
the “mind-forged manacles” represent the mental instability of the people who
were suffering.
So,
everyone who lived in London at that time, lived in fear and misery because
everything is banned and they can only cry. The
use of the word “hear” in lines 8 and 13, emphasis that the sounds of the poem
are real. This emphasis on hearing expresses the poet’s desire for the reader to
hear along him.
In
the third stanza
Blake compares the situation of the innocent people and the situation of the
dominant classes. The innocent people cannot choice their kind of life. The
Church and the Royalty are responsible of the suffering of innocent people. Here
Blake makes a denounce because his main objective through his writings is to
criticise the aristocratic, social and political norms. The
oppressed are portrayed as actual people while the oppressors are illustrated as
empty, dark buildings.
In
the first line Blake makes reference to the “Chimney-sweepers”, here Blake is
making reference to those children that had to work very hard because they were
obliged by the Church mainly. The chimney-sweepers are one of the most important
characters that Blake uses and talks about in his poems and they are the main
character in “Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience”.
In
the third line of this stanza Blake makes reference to the “Soldiers”, and says
that the blood of soldiers dirties the walls of the palace. These soldiers
represent all the soldiers that were sent by the Royalty to fight, because at
this time an important revolution, the French Revolution, took place. These
soldiers had no choice and they were obliged to fight and to die serving their
country. The Royalty ignored the situation of these men.
In
the last stanza
Blake talks about how life begin, how “the new-born Infants” began their life in
misery because they were sons of prostitutes. A new-life should bring happiness
but Blake in his poem sees this new-life as the beginning of a new cycle of
poverty and corruption.
In
the second and the third lines of this stanza, Blake criticises the “youthful
Harlots” who can transmit an illness to their sons.
Another
important point that Blake criticises is the marriage. Marriage, as a new-life,
should bring happiness, but Blake criticises this because at his time there were
many marriages for convenience rather than for love, and Blake compares this
with a plague.
So,
Blake compares a positive term as can be marriage with a negative one as hearse.
He is comparing marriage with a vehicle related with death. Here we can see that
William Blake makes use of a rhetorical figure called oxymoron because Blake put
two terms together, that normally are contradictory.
So,
after the commentary of that poem we arrive to a conclusion. William Blake in
his poem London is showing us the real situation that poor people were
living, specially in the city of London, in the Romantic period (18th
century). The Romantic period took place during the Industrial Revolution. It
was
a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment
period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of
nature in art and literature. Roamntics wrote to criticise the situation of
those people who belonged to the low social classes.
So,
William Blake represents the relation that individuals have with society. The
individual lived in isolation. There are two things that were the most important
for romantics: the individual and nature. The human activity was conditioned by
the
nature.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism)
We
can see these ideas reading this poem London because everyone, even the
children, was isolated and they didn’t receive any help from the dominant
classes.
William
Blake believe that through his poetry he could change the world. He fought
against slavery and racism thanks to his works, showing the
truth.
To
end this essay about the poem “London” I want to give my opinion. I
don’t know that poet, but when I read some of his poems that belonged to “Songs
of Innocence and Songs of Experience” I thought that my essay had to be about
it. I like this poem, because I think that all that William Blake said in it is
true. We cannot understand what had happened at Blake’s time because we have not
lived all that corruption and the poverty that existed in a place like London at
the 18th century. But thanks to some writers that were interested in
the real life of poor people, we can see through their writings all that
injustice.
I
just want to say that I recommend that poem to everybody, because it’s really
interesting and because thanks to this poem you can see how was the real world
many years ago.
SOURCES:
Romanticism
a critical reader
by Duncan Wu.
Romantic
Writings.
Stephen Bygrave.
London
English Romantic Poets. Modern Essays
in Criticism. Second edition by M.H.
Abrams.
Poetas
Románticos Ingleses Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth.
José María
Valverde y Leopoldo Panero.
