Hello everybody and welcome to this video where I'm going to analyse the poem ‘London’
by William Blake.
Everything that I go through in this video can be found in my guide to
‘My Last Duchess’ and other poems, available for £3.99 at MrBruff.com.
So, why not pick
up a copy and, then, you won't have to write all of this down as you're watching the video.
So, as always, we start off with the poet William Blake.
And we're looking for details
that help us to understand the poem ‘London’ and not just any old detail about the poet.
So let me give you some important facts.
Blake was born in 1757 in London, where he actually
lived for almost his entire life.
And this gives the strong impression that the ‘I’
in the poem walking through the streets of London is Blake himself writing from his own
experience.
He was a poet, a painter, and a printmaker.
He had an interesting relationship with religion.
He respected the Bible.
He thought of himself
as a Christian.
He believed in Jesus and God.
But he disliked organised religion such as
the Church of England.
In 1800, he moved from London to the village of Felpham, but he returned in 1804, where
he, then, carried on living in London until his death in 1827.
He often wrote about rebelling
against the misuse of power and class, and that's obviously something that is really
important in this poem in terms of the cluster of poetry you’re studying.
A little bit about the publishing context, ‘London’ comes from Blake's collection
‘Songs of Experience’, 1794.
Now, this collection was a companion piece to the earlier
‘Songs of Innocence’ in 1789.
But as soon as ‘Songs of Experience’ was published--
The two were always published together, as you see on the screen here in one volume.
And the two were supposed to be seen as a sort of companion piece to each other.
‘Songs
of Innocence’ focuses on simple moral lessons for children to learn, with poems often focusing
on nature.
But ‘Songs of Experience’ focuses on a much harsher view of a world corrupted
by humans.
And in terms of the power and conflict cluster, ‘London’ coming from ‘Songs of Experience’
can be seen as a critique of human power, exposing the distance between those in power
and those who are suffering.
And the suffering is inescapable because of the misuse of power
by those in control.
So that's the kind of angle this poem takes in terms of the context
of the cluster it comes from.
A little bit on the historical context about industrialisation.
So when Blake was born,
the population of London was around 760,000.
Only a hundred years later, it was over three
million.
And one of the major influences for the rise in population was the Industrial
Revolution.
And this was something that Blake was really against.
The Industrial Revolution began in around 1760 and, to put it simply, it just marked
a shift from country life to city life.
Machines were invented which could complete work quicker
than humans had done in the past.
And this brought about big changes in agriculture,
in manufacturing, and transport.
Industrial factories were created, and conditions in
those were often terrible.
So, for example, children as young as five or six would be made to work in them because
they were so small they could get in and around the machinery easily.
And there were often
six-year-olds who would work 19 hours a day in these factories.
So if you think your exam
workload is pretty high, imagine being a six-year-old in this timeframe.
And London just became a smoke-ridden city.
Nature was being ruined, it was felt.
And
the Industrial Revolution just sort of filled the air with smog and smoke.
And this is one
of the important contextual factors explored in Blake's poem.
Let's have a quick look at the poem.
It's not too difficult, but I'll give you a reading
and a simple translation.
I wander through 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.
So our first-person speaker is telling us,
‘I walk through the streets of London near the River Thames.
And in the faces of everybody
that I meet, I see signs of weakness and unhappiness.’
In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
So this is really saying, ‘Every sound I hear, whether it's the cry of a man, the cry
of a child, in every voice, I realise people are trapped in every way.
Mentally as well
as physically.’
How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church of appals,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls
So this is a stanza I'll explore in a second.
But, really, it's just saying ‘the distress
of these people ruins this place’.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
So, ‘what I hear the most at night when I'm walking around is the sound of young prostitutes
swearing.
And that ruins the innocence of newly born babies who hear that swearing,
and it makes something that should be good so bad.’
Now I'm going to talk to you about language and structure.
Structure points tend to be
the least written about, so I'm going to give you a few ideas here.
There are all on the
screen.
The first thing I want to talk about, then, is the repetitive structure.
So the poem is
written entirely in quatrains, which is stanzas of four lines each.
And the rhyme scheme is
ABAB.
So the first line rhymes with the third, and the second with the fourth.
Now repetition is a key point in this poem.
So we can see the repetitive stanza structure
and the repetitive rhyme scheme, reflecting the relentless, repetitive, and overwhelming
suffering in the city.
And there's also repetition of words, which you can see colour-coded on
the actual poem itself here.
So it's not just the repetitive rhyme scheme, the repetitive quatrains, there are actually
lots of words repeated.
And this is something that Blake does, not just in this poem but
in a lot of his poetry.
But in ‘London’, we see the repetition of ‘charter’d’
twice, ‘mark’ three times, and ‘every’ three times.
Now, each of these can be and will be, in this video, analysed separately.
But on a
simple note, the repetition of words, like the repetition of stanza structure and the
repetition of rhyme scheme, reflects how the life of suffering is repetitive and inescapable.
There's no relief from it.
There's no let-up because it's a result of the choices of those
in positions of power, who are the only people who could do something about it.
And we'll
talk about that in a second.
As we see on the left here, the whole text
structure is also significant.
Stanzas one and two focus on the people who are suffering.
Stanza three explores the causes of the suffering.
And we'll look at those in a second, but it
highlights the church, industrialisation, landowners, and the monarchy and the government.
The final stanza, though, returns to the focus of those who are suffering again.
So, by ending
with the same topic as the poem began with, the poet is implementing a cyclical, repetitive
structure which, once again, highlights the inescapable fate of those in the city.
It
goes round in circles.
Just when you think you've got to the end, you're back at the
beginning again.
But not everything follows a strict structural pattern in this poem.
If we have a look at
the use of metre, have a look at this: I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow Now, most of the poem is written in iambic
tetrameter.
This means lines of eight syllables with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables.
You can see the ones in bold are the ones we stress, that we put emphasis on when we're
reading.
The repetition of this metre, then, we could say, “Well, that's another example of the
repetitive, inescapable life that poor people in London have.”
But not everything is written
in this metre.
Some lines contain seven syllables.
So, one example of that is this line, line
four: ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe.’
Now, in a line that is pointing out the weakness of those who are suffering, the line itself
is weak in its syllable count.
It contains less than the previous lines.
Its lesser than
them.
It's weaker than them.
So Blake is weakening the line here to reflect the weakness of those
who are suffering.
And you can use your own time to look for other occasions where there's only seven syllables
in a line, and consider why they are important.
Leave a comment in the comment section.
I
love looking at the analyses you guys pick out.
So those are my points on structure.
Now when it comes to language, it's kind of interesting how you look at this poem.
Because
if you just look at the poem and look at the imagery of suffering – and I've highlighted
a lot of it in red here – much of the poem presents the suffering – we could call it
conflict, couldn't we?
For the power and conflict cluster – of the people in London: ‘Marks
of weakness’, ‘marks of woe’, the ‘cry of every Man’, the ‘cry of fear’, the
‘mind-forg’d manacles’, ‘the Chimney-sweepers cry’, ‘the hapless Soldiers sigh’, ‘the
youthful Harlots curse’, ‘the new-born Infants tear’, the ‘blights with plagues’.
There's this overwhelmingly long list of negative language, which you could analyse one by one
or cumulatively.
You could say the overwhelming effect of so much of it is the same as all
of the structural features I've talked about, that it just overwhelms you and reflects how
overwhelmed those suffering are.
But I want to look at the causes of these problems.
Because, as a poem centred on power,
it's not enough to just write about the problems, like the cries, the marks, the plagues, the
curses.
We've got to think about what they're caused by.
And what they're caused by are
those in power.
So let's have a look first at the word ‘charter’d’ which appears twice.
Now the first draft of
Blake's poem did not contain this word.
Originally, the poem described a dirty street.
It was
changed to ‘charter’d’.
So the fact that it was changed from a different word
and the fact that it's repeated twice in the first two lines means we really need to think
carefully about it.
Unfortunately, it's a word that we, perhaps, don't have a lot of understanding of today.
So, a little bit of context.
Between 1760 and 1820, a lot of the land of England, around
six million acres, was taken into private ownership.
Land that was, at one point, seen
as public land was given ownership.
And a charter was a document issued by a government
or political official that granted certain rights or privileges; the documents that stated
who owned what, in this case.
Now, the creation and management of those
charters made profit for bankers and merchants.
It made a lot of people rich.
And it also
was something that wound people like Blake up.
So, much of his early poetry to do with
nature, suddenly the nature is owned.
Somebody owns it and designates who can go in it and
all of that kind of thing.
It becomes a business the sort of ‘businessification’ – as
a creator, a word there – of the natural world.
So the first usage of ‘charter’d’ refers to the fact that the properties around the
speaker are privately owned.
And it’s a criticism of that.
But the repetition of ‘charter’d’
then talks about the ‘charter’d Thames’.
And we're talking here about the River Thames,
and we're seeing an interesting image of the forcing of human power and control onto something
natural, a river.
There is, as we see in lots of poems in this cluster, a sort of contrast, a juxtaposition
of the power of nature and the supposed power of man.
Man would seek to charter, to control
and organise everything.
Even something as uncontrollable and natural as the River Thames.
So the second use of the word ‘charter’d’, it can be seen as a satirical attack of the
obsession with property rights and, as an extension of that, human power and control.
The irony pointed out by Blake is that a river cannot really be controlled by the passing
of a law.
And Blake is writing ironically of the ‘charter’d Thames’.
So, one of the causes of suffering is the misuse of power through the chartering of
each ‘charter’d street’ and the ‘charter’d Thames’ which saw the rich getting richer,
the poor being more heavily controlled and governed, and it widens the gap between the
poor and those in power.
And all of that from the word ‘charter’d’.
Now stanza one also contains another example of repetition:
‘And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’
Now, if you think about it, whenever a poet chooses to repeat something, a bit like with
Ted Hughes’ ‘Bayonet Charge’ with the repetition of ‘raw’ in the first stanza,
it’s to really hammer home the importance of it.
So what can we think about these words?
Well, they’ve actually got two different meanings.
The first example is ‘mark in
every face I meet’ meaning ‘notice every face’.
And, then, we move to ‘marks of
weakness, marks of woe’ meaning ‘signs of weakness, signs of woe’.
So the same word is used, but now with a different meaning.
Why is that?
Well, as I've already
pointed out, the repetition highlights the inescapable, repetitive suffering of those
in the poem.
But the use of a word with changing meanings could also reflect the poet's frustration
at the changing nature of London, again, at the hands of those in power.
Clearly, Blake did not agree with these changes.
Shortly after this poem was published, he
left London, albeit just for a few short years.
Now the repetition in stanza 2 of ‘in every’,
so I want to think about how this is the most numerous example of repetition in the poem.
‘In every…
In every…
In every…’, it builds up to the final line in the stanza,
which is ‘the mind-forg’d manacles I hear’.
So the speaker, when he hears these cries,
what he hears in the cries and voices is the mind-forged manacles.
Now what does this mean?
Blake is imagining the mind as a forge.
A forge is a sort of blacksmith's workshop where
they would make something like these manacles, which are kind of like handcuffs.
Now for readers at the time, the poem was, of course, going to have a different effect
than it does for us now.
And, at the time, this image would have been a very shocking
one because readers would have seen manacles on criminals and would have viewed them with
horror.
But the manacles are also a link to the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who wrote, in 1762, ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’
Now, what is this about?
It's quite complex, really, but Blake is agreeing with Rousseau.
So his line about the mind-forged manacles is an intertextual reference to Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and he's talking about the fact that man's lack of freedom – his manacles,
his chains, his handcuffs – are mind forged.
They come from the ideas and outlook imposed
on us by external authority.
And that external Authority is the government of charters, as
we've seen.
But other places too.
So, we see other examples of, where does this mind-forged
manacle come from?
One of those to
look at is the idea of: ‘the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls’ Now, to understand this image, we need to
know a little bit about the French Revolution.
The French Revolution was influenced by the
Enlightenment, with its overthrow of the monarchy in striving for political freedom.
A lot of
people supported it.
All of the poets you're studying in this cluster supported the French
Revolution to begin with.
But it devolved into bloodshed and chaos, bringing home the
evil of mankind, and it lost the support there.
And there was so much bloodshed that the hyperbolic phrase ‘blood was running down the walls’
became popular at this time.
And Blake is suggesting, through ‘the hapless soldier’s
sigh runs in blood down palace walls’, that the unhappiness of the British soldier could
lead to a similar uprising if its causes continue to be ignored.
And the reference to ‘palace’
here shows us, as well, the idea that the monarchy is to blame as well.
So what can we say about all this?
The poor are suffering because of the abuse of power
from the church, the monarchy, the government, rich landowners.
But what is the result?
Well, let's look at the final image of the poem.
‘And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.’
Here's an oxymoron, two words together which
seem to contradict each other.
How can the happy image of marriage be linked to the image
of death associated with the hearse?
This overwhelmingly negative image suggests that
what was so good – the London of old that Blake clearly loved – is destined to be
destroyed.
It's a powerful ending to a challenging poem which criticises those in positions of
power.
Be it the monarchy, the government, organised religion, or landowners, the misuse
of power by all of these groups leads to widespread suffering and despair.
I hope you enjoyed this video, guys.
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