London by William Blake (1794): a walk through a city full of suffering, written in the years of the French Revolution, and how Blake uses four regular quatrains, repetition and shocking images.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I wander thro’ each charter’d street', 'Marks of weakness, marks of woe', 'In every cry of every Man', 'The mind-forg’d manacles I hear', 'Every black’ning Church appalls', 'Runs in blood down Palace walls', 'But most thro’ midnight streets I hear', 'How the youthful Harlot’s curse', 'Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear', 'And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse'.
Form and structure: four quatrains with regular rhyme and a steady, trudging rhythm, the speaker as a walker who observes, and a movement from faces to sounds to the worst sight of all at midnight.
Language: repetition of 'charter'd' and 'every', the metaphor of 'mind-forg'd manacles', the Church and the Palace stained by the suffering of chimney sweeps and soldiers, and the oxymoron 'Marriage hearse'.
Context: Blake (1757–1827), a London engraver and poet; Songs of Experience (1794), illustrated and printed by Blake himself; and the poem as an attack on the Church, the monarchy and the poverty of a city changed by industry, written as revolution shook France.
Compares well with: Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (two views of London), Nothing's Changed (anger at injustice in a divided city) and Stewart Island (a speaker who sees past a place's surface).
