Commentary about "London" by William Blake
Commentary about “London” by William Blake
London, which consists of sixteen lines, is not just a description of William Blake’s birthplace but also a detailed poem of how the social status works in London. The poem is a devastating and concise political analysis delivered with passionate anger. It is revealing the complex connections between patterns of ownership and the ruling ideology, the way all human relations are inescapably bound together within a single destructive society. The reason why Blake wrote it was because he believed that the human spirit was being suppressed by custom and politics. His idea in the poem was that humanity could flower if long-established institutions could be altered or removed. For this reason his poem “London” is revolutionary because it stresses the need to correct the misery the speaker describes. Those who are degraded should be healthy and wholesome. By contrast, Blake reminds us in the poem of privilege, soldiers, and palaces, all of them aspects of oppressive authority. Songs of Experience, from which “London” was taken, was a collection of poems on this basic theme. Blake published the work in 1794; the French Revolution was only five years old at the time, with his own engravings.
The poem’s opening shows the narrator wandering the “charter’d” streets of London down to the “charter’d Thames”. The loaded word “charter’d” is used in a critical sense, and Blake’s contemporary readers would no doubt have picked up on it. The first two lines of the first verse talks about how the ruling class not only controls the street but also the river that should be flowing freely. The repetition of the word “mark” is emphatic; the Londoners are branded with visible signs of sickness and misery. There is a biblical sense at work here, as in the mark of the Beast from Revelations, or the mark of Cain, the murderous “builder of the first city”. The subtle shift from “mark” used as a verb in line three to a noun in line four binds the
London, which consists of sixteen lines, is not just a description of William Blake’s birthplace but also a detailed poem of how the social status works in London. The poem is a devastating and concise political analysis delivered with passionate anger. It is revealing the complex connections between patterns of ownership and the ruling ideology, the way all human relations are inescapably bound together within a single destructive society. The reason why Blake wrote it was because he believed that the human spirit was being suppressed by custom and politics. His idea in the poem was that humanity could flower if long-established institutions could be altered or removed. For this reason his poem “London” is revolutionary because it stresses the need to correct the misery the speaker describes. Those who are degraded should be healthy and wholesome. By contrast, Blake reminds us in the poem of privilege, soldiers, and palaces, all of them aspects of oppressive authority. Songs of Experience, from which “London” was taken, was a collection of poems on this basic theme. Blake published the work in 1794; the French Revolution was only five years old at the time, with his own engravings.
The poem’s opening shows the narrator wandering the “charter’d” streets of London down to the “charter’d Thames”. The loaded word “charter’d” is used in a critical sense, and Blake’s contemporary readers would no doubt have picked up on it. The first two lines of the first verse talks about how the ruling class not only controls the street but also the river that should be flowing freely. The repetition of the word “mark” is emphatic; the Londoners are branded with visible signs of sickness and misery. There is a biblical sense at work here, as in the mark of the Beast from Revelations, or the mark of Cain, the murderous “builder of the first city”. The subtle shift from “mark” used as a verb in line three to a noun in line four binds the