London

London by William Blake follows a speaker walking through the streets of London. Everywhere he looks he sees misery, and he blames the people and institutions in power: the Church, the monarchy and the wealthy.

Blake published it in 1794, in Songs of Experience. He was a Romantic and a radical who supported the French Revolution of 1789, when ordinary people rose up against the king and the rich. London was growing fast, with child labour and great poverty.

The poem has four quatrains, four-line stanzas, with a regular ABAB rhyme and a steady beat, like the speaker's footsteps, or the relentless misery he sees.

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd 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-forg'd manacles I hear.

The repeated ‘In every’ (anaphora) shows that suffering is everywhere, affecting everyone.

The word ‘charter'd’ is repeated: even the streets and the River Thames are owned and controlled, by law and by trade. Nothing is free.

The ‘mind-forg'd manacles’ are chains made in the mind: people are trapped by their own acceptance of the way things are, as well as by those in power.

Blake links suffering to its causes: ‘the hapless Soldier's sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls’, blaming the monarchy for soldiers' deaths. The poem ends with the oxymoron ‘Marriage hearse’: even love and new life are poisoned.

Themes: the power of humans and institutions; suffering and poverty; protest.

Compares well with:

• Checking Out Me History: a protest against those in power.
• Ozymandias: another Romantic attack on tyranny.
• The Émigrée: a city seen through one person's eyes.