LONDON by William Blake.
What gives this poem its power is its ambiguity. It has a hallucinatory, nightmarish quality, created through a blurring of physical, psychological and sensory phenomena.
Examples of what I mean:
1/
What gives this poem its power is its ambiguity. It has a hallucinatory, nightmarish quality, created through a blurring of physical, psychological and sensory phenomena.
Examples of what I mean:
1/
The "marks of weakness, marks of woe" suggest physical signs, but "weakness" and "woe" can be seen psychologically. Is it physical weakness, mental weakness or both?
2/
2/
"The mind-forg'd manacles I hear"
Again Blake is blurring a psychological aspect with a sensory one: the poet can "hear" others' state of mind. And the message here is ambiguous too: is it internalised weakness that causes imagined enslavement, or external factors?
3/
Again Blake is blurring a psychological aspect with a sensory one: the poet can "hear" others' state of mind. And the message here is ambiguous too: is it internalised weakness that causes imagined enslavement, or external factors?
3/
"Chimney sweepers" are a great image because they are typical of an exploited underclass, but because cleaning chimneys suggests cleaning away the byproduct of modernity and industrialisation. Pollution in the poem is both literal and moral.
4/
4/
The "cry" of the sweepers seems to becomes the sooty pollution that "blackens" the churches. The sensory and the moral blur into one. The
church blackens in colour and in cruelty. "Appals" is ambivalent: do the churches pity the children or despise them?
5/
church blackens in colour and in cruelty. "Appals" is ambivalent: do the churches pity the children or despise them?
5/
And in "appals" I heat the echo of a "pall" of smoke -- the cry of children is what pollutes and blackens the church.
More transformation: "The hapless soldiers sigh runs in blood down palace walls."
6/
More transformation: "The hapless soldiers sigh runs in blood down palace walls."
6/
From the psychological -- the soldiers' fear -- to the sensory -- the sound of their cry -- to the physical -- their blood running down the wall.
Blood pollutes the walls of the palace just as the church was "blackened". Walls are important here as a symbol of division.
7/
Blood pollutes the walls of the palace just as the church was "blackened". Walls are important here as a symbol of division.
7/
And there's one more sound to hear in Blake's London: "the youthful harlot's curse". This becomes physical too -- a "blight" of disease infecting families.
8/
8/
I admire this poem for the nightmarish urban world it creates in just 16 short lines, and I love how Blake achieves this by transforming sights and sounds into something greater.
9/9
9/9
That should be sigh* for the soldiers, obvs, not cry.
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