London — Power and Conflict — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
London
The poems
What you need to know
London by William Blake: what it is about, its context, and how Blake uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I wander through each chartered street', 'Marks of weakness, marks of woe', 'The mind-forged manacles I hear', 'Every black'ning church appalls', 'Runs in blood down palace walls', 'the youthful harlot's curse', 'And blights with plagues the marriage hearse'.
Form: four regular quatrains, rhyme and rhythm as a trudge through the streets, and repetition.
Context: Blake's Songs of Experience (1794), the French Revolution, and child chimney sweeps.
Comparisons with Ozymandias, Checking Out Me History and The Émigrée.
