William Blake: Final Version

         The poem London by William Blake is from his work called Songs of Experience, published in 1794 in England and just in the period of the French Revolution, when authors wrote with the romantic topics, looking for the contemplation of nature and free spaces and all printed with a tone of dramatic nature.

         The first impression when reading the poem’s title is that the author is going to speak about the city of London, to tell us how London is and probably what he feels in the city. And at first reading I think the poet writes about what he remembers of the city. It is evident that Blake addresses his poem to no person, the poet’s addressee is London. There is an allegory, a personification of the city, the city becomes a person to be addressed.

         The language the poet uses is simple and the only problem I have found is the contraction of some words as in line 1: thro’ each. This is a very direct language, and there are so many repetitions that the poet uses to emphasize his feelings, with something that is repeated: lines 5, 6 and 7 ( in every), he wants to tell us that something is common in different sites: in the cry of a man, in infants’ fear, in voices… and the structure of the poem is very simple too, it is divided in four paragraphs with four verses each one.

         In each paragraph the poet describes a different feeling. In the first paragraph the author talks about when he walked around England, near the Thames and how he examined each human mark, of weakness and woe. Blake as all romantic poets does not like civilization, he liked nature and he liked spaces where there is nobody, and to argue this feeling he speaks against human marks, and he only sees bad marks and he scorns them because of these marks. In the second one he tells us where he finds the marks, and they are in cry of pain of people, in the fear of children, in every voices of everybody and specially in prohibitions, in the minds forged by bands, Blake does not like how the civilization manipulates our mind and forces us to act in a strict manner. If he is free in the landscape ( we can see that in other poems of the same author, called To Summer, where he talks about the pleasure of joining the life in contact with nature and far from civilization) he can act in a free way, without rules, and he would not be mind- forged. He says he can hear the manacles that presses people. When we analyse the paragraph number three we see specific groups of persons and social entities. The Chimney- sweeper is a person that cleans the chimneys of all the city, they have also a metaphoric meaning that is to have the faculty of cleaning the defects of society. As the author tells us in his poem The Chimney- Sweeper, a child whose mother died in the birth, were sent by the father to learn this job, it was not a job with reputation but it was a job. These boys were condemned because the blackness they got when cleaning the chimney, is a reference to coloured people that were condemned because his colour of skin was regarded with obscurity. Then he mentions the Church, Soldiers and Palace, social entities that forge us, that put on us the rules of society. When we look at these entities we find they broke the rules every time. The author talks about the appals, the blood that runs down and sighs of people that is also condemned but that they want to follow the rules that condemn them. And finally, in the last, the author goes directly to mention the problems that annoy him and they are the cause why he wants to get away to the landscape’s freedom; the midnight sounds importunate him, and also the laments of Infants and how marriage blights people like a plague, he does not like this and he wants to go to a place where this does not exist. It is important to mention that Blake makes about Harlots curse, the prostitution, and the relation with youthful, in this period it was very common that men went with promiscuous women, in France for example, there was a cabaret, where men went to have sexual relations with prostitutes, called Moulin Rouge. Blake does not like this, he criticises this style of life. All the poem is a critic text of civilization, of its rules and of people actions.