London experience Flashcards
“I wander thro”
Blake creates the impression that he is wandering through London, observing life in this bustling, frightening city. It also suggests a person who may be aimless, but is taking time to think about what he sees. It prepares the reader for the significant — and harrowing — comments that will follow.
“charter’d”
he use of the word “chartered” has several historical meanings. Blake’s friend, activist Thomas Paine, criticized the granting of Royal Charters to control trade as a form of class oppression. So, the streets of London are not free – they are controlled by corporate entities which by extension control the people too.
“Chartered” could also mean “freighted”, and may refer to the busy or overburdened streets and river, or to the licensed trade carried on within them.
Blake originally used the word “dirty”:
“chartered Thames does flow”
Thames was simply polluted and filthy
In the 18th century, the Thames was one of the busiest waterways in the world, and thoroughly contaminated. Hardly anything could survive in its water but bacteria and eels. People (often prostitutes) frequently committed suicide in it, with their disease-ridden bodies rotting in it for days. And yet the River Thames has been an inspiration for a range of poetic visions. In his nuptial celebration poem written in 1596, ‘Prothalamion’, Edmund Spenser wrote:
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song…
William Wordsworth in 1802 wrote his poem in praise of London, entitled ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’:
Earth has not anything to show more fair …
The river glideth at his own sweet will …
Blake rejects absolutely these romanticised visions.
NB. The River Thames has retained its romantic image despite our modern understanding of the dangers of pollution and our awareness that the cholera outbreaks in the mid-nineteenth century were caused by sewage-tainted drinking water.
The Thames is a river, rivers are usually associated with being naturally flowing, however, “charter’d” insinuates the idea that the ones in power during Blake’s period restricts it, and almost like they plan every step of their lives.
The river Thames flows quietly by the side of London bearing witness to all the ugly and crushing scenes of London.
“mark”
The overall picture is of seething suffering humanity; a sea of faces.
metaphor for a brand, people were were not rich were branded to show their place in society
The simple repetition of ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe …’ lends a poignancy to the end of this stanza. Blake uses alliteration to link the despair (woe) to the futility (weakness), amplifying just how damaged the population of London was. The two phrases within the line have the same syntactic construction, a device known as syntactic parallelism; the repetition giving emphasis. Note also that “weakness” and “woe” create a semantic field of suffering.
the poverty-stricken majority of the population would have had a skimpy, poor and monotonous diet which would have barely kept them alive, let alone healthy.
Every face in the city is melancholy because of his misery caused by man, all the so-called industrial progress has brought about misery for most of them. This poem is the criticism of the society and the whole trend of the contemporary society. It is a protest against the exploitation of the poor by the rich.
“every”
repetition shows the scale of suffering
Powerful repetition of ‘every’ and ‘cry’ develops the sense that Blake’s London is a tortuous and agonising place in which to live. The sense that everybody, regardless of age, is living in this dystopian city pervades. The lines are structured to constitute a list, building up a picture of an abundance of suffering,.
The repetition of ‘In every …’ is a device called anaphora with the same two words coming at the beginning of three lines. This adds a rhythmic emphasis to reinforce the meaning. It is also another example of syntactic parallelism.
“mind-forged manacles”
alteration emphasises the metaphor which Blake uses to show how people’s own weakness holds them back
A striking line: the previously described trials of the oppressed population make Blake aware of the systems of control – religious, social, economic, political and monarchical – which keep the people in a state of sufferation. The compressed compound adjective ‘mind-forged’ is especially memorable, with ‘mind’ a noun modifier for ‘forged’. Note also the long vowels which make the line difficult to say — almost a tongue-twister — expressing the mental restrictions it describes.
Blake uses it to emphasize the point that these manacles, while a direct result of religious, social, economic, and political forms of control, are also perpetuated by our own limitations. In other words, we create our own internal mental prisons.
suggested that the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ refer to London’s, and England’s, unwillingness to follow the lead of France and revolt against their tyrannical oppressors: the French Revolution was five years old when Blake published ‘London’, and Blake’s support of the French Revolution lends credence to this interpretation of the poem. Is he bemoaning Londoners’ reluctance to free themselves, and their apparent willingness to remain slaves?
The mouth is used to ‘cry’ (three times), ‘sigh’, and ‘curse’, but never to utter any meaningful objection or opposition to the ‘manacles’ that keep Londoners in their psychological chains.
“How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,”
Quote is juxtaposition.
It contrasts how the chimney sweepers are very innocent and dirty and how the church at the time was clean but rather corrupt.
The chimney-sweeper symbolizes the abuse of innocence which is such a key theme in Blake’s work— He even has a poem of that title in this series . Boys were forced by poverty into this dangerous and exploitative employment. This links to the next line where their cry metaphorically blackens the church, with its alleged care for the weak. Though the children have dirty, blackened faces, they are innocent. The church, however, is blackened or sullied by its complicity in the abuse and exploitation of the vulnerable. The hypocrisy appalls Blake.
Blake moves from introspective musings to specific social realism, in that he focuses on ‘the chimney-sweeper’. Note that each of the characters in the poem is described with a capital letter, so that they represent a section of society. Unlike academics and postulating ‘thinkers’, Blake always returns to real experiences. This is continued in the following stanza’s references to a soldier, harlot, and new-born baby.
“hapless Soldiers sigh”
This line, along with the one immediately after it, refers to the way events are controlled by outside forces. The “hapless” soldier’s sigh “run[ning] in blood” down the enclosures of power–metaphorically staining the palace’s pristine walls–could speak to Blake’s understanding of the futility of existence, the destructive stupidity of war, or the fact that soldiers who die while following orders have literally given control of their life to their country, and thus lack agency over their fates.
Note the alliterative repetition of ‘a’s and ‘p’s in ‘appalls’ and ‘hapless’, which give unity to the stanza. Also the plosive ‘b’s and ‘p’s in ‘blackening’ and ‘blood’, and ‘Palace’, ‘appalls’ and again ‘hapless’ express the anger and despair of the speaker.
To reinforce the speaker’s synaesthesia — whose ‘mind-forged manacles’ sees the worst in everything around him (an unfortunate condition of Experience) and causes him to have his aural experience manifest itself in horrible sights (literally seeing sounds) — Blake has made an acrostic of this stanza with the first letter of each line spelling ‘H E A R’. The speaker is overwhelmed by the suffering that marks his perception as much as it marks the hapless victims of an Industrial Empire.
Although Blake had an encounter with a drunken soldier invading his property in 1803, who is named in Blake’s later prophetic works (and a reversed image from this plate of the old man and child appear in Plate 84 of ‘Jerusalem’), our sympathy here in London is with the soldier as a victim of the state.
The third stanza sees two institutions associated with wealth and grandeur – the Church and the Palace – invaded by the corrupt realities of Blake’s London: a world in which industrialisation leads to small children being exploited and maltreated through their employment as chimney-sweeps, and in which ‘hapless’ (i.e. unlucky) soldiers sent off to fight spill their blood for uncaring kings. ‘Appals’ in this stanza is a nice word: the Church is literally turned the colour of a pall (black) by the sooty breath of the chimney-sweep, but palls are associated with funerals, summoning the premature deaths of so many children who died from injury or ill-health while performing the job of a chimney-sweep. The word also, of course, carries its more familiar, abstract meaning: ‘appals’ as in shocks.
“blood down Palace walls”
Blake envisions beautiful revolution, the soldier’s blood a symbol of the people fighting back against their monarchical oppressors–visions inspired by the French and American revolutions and independence movements
The “blood down palace walls” may refer to the corrupt European governments of the Romantic era. The blood may refer to those who were oppressed under the monarchy and those with powerful financial interests. Examples of those harmed and killed by the government are mentioned in the previous three lines. For example, the “hapless soldier” perhaps died because of corruption or mismanagement in the government and the military. Blake accuses the monarchy of wasting lives on causes that have no meaning for ordinary people.
The “palace walls” form a border between the rich, privileged men in power and the poor soldiers. In a corrupt military system the ‘leaders’ refused to take responsibility for the deaths of the soldiers
“midnight streets”
Midnight is also a metaphor for sinister happenings, when demons rise from graveyards and threaten humans.
midnight is often associated with death
The streets were bad before midnight
after everything that he has seen whilst on his walk, this has to be the most upsetting and horrific thing that he has seen to date. He is unable to comprehend how awful the sights that he has seen tonight are, and how unwilling people with the opportunity to help are so against doing it.
“youthful Harlots curse”
The desperation of London is summed up by the young prostitute cursing. Is she cursing as in swearing, or cursing others, like the men who exploit her? Or is she herself, also cursed?
Her curse furthermore harms the new-born infant. “Blasts” would suggest that her own howl of anger and grief frightens her child; she doesn’t take his tears into account. She may be cursing the child himself or her fate. But Blake’s main point is in the final line: her curse calls down judgment on the poor state of marriage at the time (infidelity was taken for granted by many men) and turns the carriage ridden by newlyweds into a hearse.
The word “youthful” here is a direct criticism of the conditions for young, working-class women in the time of George III. Poor urban women worked as seamstresses (which required skill that took time to learn), and in domestic service.
The early industrial revolution, (the ‘Romantic’ era) when Blake lived, started in the north of England; factory work for women and children was beginning to grow and mill towns to spring up, though conditions in the mills and factories were terrible. But in London those who failed to find work sewing or in domestic service fell back on prostitution as the most viable means of subsistence. This was the fate for thousands of young women with nowhere else to turn. Before taking up the profession, this young unencumbered girl might have been an ‘English rose’ as opposed to her now haggard, cursing self.
“infants tear”
The harlot’s curse from the line before even sullies the cry of the innocent. Babies born to syphilitic mothers (who had been infected by husbands who frequented brothels) had painful seeping eyes. Of course, new born babies cry, but Blake is suggesting that even this is connected to the oppression endured by those living in London— through syphilis and sexually transmitted diseases that found their way into the “marriage hearse”, connecting the sex trade to the bonds of wedlock and childhood.
It is as if the chain of social disease links the oppressions of sex trade with the oppressions of marriage: as if both sexual outlets, the 2 options for sexual experience, are both the same, both ‘manacled’, both sick with literal and mental disease. A bold assertion even now.
lend his voice to their voicelessness, to suggest that such wretched misery goes beyond words, at least for those suffering London’s hardships.
He finds in the cries of children and men the replica of men’s own sinful deeds.
“blights and plagues”
It appears that the harlot’s curse attacks and mars, or marks, the institution of marriage. London itself is marked by the depravity caused by the oppressive nature of the political and religious systems which allow such evil and exploitation to exist. Blight and plague are the result.
“Marriage hearse”
oxymoronic, this phrase shows Blake’s feelings towards the institution of marriage, which he felt was another form of religious control curtailing the natural impulses of humanity.
appears to mean that the young unmarried mother’s unwanted child, and the misery of both mother and infant alike, is the final nail in the coffin of the idea of marriage as a sacred union which is associated not only with bliss but with blessing (because it is, or was solely in Blake’s time, a holy ceremony; but also because people talk of a marriage being ‘blessed’ with a child). A ‘curse’, of course, can be merely a loud cry (or, in modern American slang, a swear word), but the word carries a ring of profanity at all times. That final line is a masterstroke: first the near-alliteration of the bl and pl plosive sounds in ‘blights’ and ‘plagues’, but then the oxymoron of ‘Marriage hearse’, with ‘hearse’ itself being a horrific constricting of ‘Harlot’s curse’, the line it rhymes with.
At midnight the curses of the young harlots are heard in the streets. This unnatural life spoils the holy tie between the wife and husband in their marital life. It is the result of the marriage devoid of lover and so a man seeks a harlot to satisfy his passion. Besides, the children, born out of the loveless marriage and out of adultery pose a great problem to the society.
