London Flashcards
Title of London…
Denotes a specific geographic space
Unlike the archetypal locales in which many of the other songs are set
Rhyme scheme?
ABAB throughout its three stanzas.
Little deviation from iambic tetrameter.
How many quatrains ?
4
Alternate rhyming lines
Striking formal feature of the poem?
Repetition
- emphasises the precedence of the horrors the speaker describes
What does ‘Charter’d’ mean?
Combined mapping and legalism
What submits to being Charter’d?
Everything in this urban space, even the natural River Thames
What effect does the repetition of ‘charter’d’ give?
Reinforces the sense of structure the speaker feels upon entering the city.
Thudding and oppressive, reflects the suffocating atmosphere of the city.
What happens within this repetition?
Words undergo transformation
What word is transformed? What is the transformation?
“Mark” (between 3rd and 4th line)
Changes from a verb to a pair of nouns
From an act of observation which allows imaginative elaboration, to an indelible print
What does this transformation of ‘mark’ essentially do?
Brands the people’s bodies regardless of the speakers actions
What does the speakers’ ‘meeting’ with these marks represent ?
The experience closest to a human encounter that the poem will offer the speaker
What does the poem ‘London’ deride?
The sterile mechanism of urban society
What recalls the introduction to Songs of Innocence, but with a twist ?
Opening image of wandering, focus on sound, and images of stains.
How many characters in this poem?
5
Who are the characters in this poem?
Harlot Chimney sweeper Infants Soldier Men
What are all the speaker’s subjects only know through ?
The traces they leave behind
What are the two traces the subjects leave behind?
‘Ubiquitous cries’
‘Blood on the palace walls’
What do these traces entail?
Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete form
Why does Blake use the human form repeatedly in his Songs?
To personify and render natural phenomena.
It’s lacking in London.
Where are we as readers far from when we enter the city ?
The piping pastoral place of the earlier poem
Who do we never see themselves?
The chimney sweep or soldier
What metamorphose into soot on church walls or blood on palace walls in the third stanza?
The cry of the chimney sweep and the sigh of the soldier
Why do neither the city’s victims or their oppressors appear in body?
Blake doesn’t simply blame a set of institutions or system of enslavement
Rather, victims help to make their own ‘mind-forg-d manacles’
