London
William Blake wrote his four quatrain dramatic monologue London as a call to arms in the wake of The French Revolution. Known to ‘wander’ the streets of North Lambeth wearing the bonnet rouge that symbolised his revolutionary sympathies, he would have been familiar with the ‘chartered’ streets of London, the suffering that was endured by the populace and witnessed the operation of the Lambeth Workhouse on his travels around the Capital - all of which personally informed his political verse.
In beginning London with the pronoun ‘I’, Blake makes a bold statement of ownership for the seditious and potentially blasphemous views he expounds; ‘I wander’ and the auditory confusion created by the homophone ‘wander’ speaks to the poet’s puzzlement and disoriented emotions. When he recalls the suffering he witnesses, he expresses his wonder at the scale of the crisis visible in ‘every’ aspect of life and this causes him to question what he knows about the human condition and The Establishment.
Given the terrible social conditions that typified George III’s reign, the Romantic movement could be characterised as a nostalgic desire to return to simpler times. Following The Enlightenment - where the wonder and dream-like possibility of the early Industrial Revolution created a euphoria around progress in Science - Romantics like Blake mourned the social toll that urbanisation took and the social nightmare that lurked beneath the rapid expansion. They were appalled at the neglect engendered by a new society that not only prioritised profit over people, but failed to consider the appropriate infrastructure it would take to make change sustainable and the result was division between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ on a hitherto unprecedented scale.
Blake documents the observations of his field trip as a sensual experience that begins with what he can see. The simple ABAB rhyming scheme he chooses feels like a march that might match his footsteps as he goes forth to examine the degradation. His strict adherence to form throughout the poem suggests he wanted to create something tightly memorable and so simple that anyone could recite it and spread the message of Blake’s protest that enough was enough. The marching, uniform quality of the poem’s structure is also notable for its directional aspect. Its dense construction plods as if in pain through a mire of deliberately harsh and emotive word choices that demonstrate an escalation in his horror the further he ventures out which magnifies the immersive impact of the experience. The further the poet strays into the city, the more intensely unpleasant it becomes until he can no longer contain his rage, culminating his verse in spitting plosives and damning accusations that seem to attach as much blame to the people for their situation as it does to the authorities for their neglect. Additionally, the iambic tetrameter (8 beats per line) enables the poem to flow in a manner that gives an upbeat first impression completely at odds with its harrowing subject matter and may be intended to further destabilise the listener, forcing them to feel ill at ease about what they are hearing. In Blake’s world, nobody gets to rest easy.
In the second stanza, Blake continues the theme of auditory confusion with the use of antanaclasis in the repeated use of ‘mark’ which creates the uncomfortable idea that the ‘weakness’ and ‘woe’ he observes is indelibly carved into the very heart of London’s poor. The alliterative use of weakness and woe and the ‘w’ glides created by these abstract nouns generates pathetic fallacy revealing a people who have given up and merged into a single chorus of wailing apathy. Indeed, he chooses words that connote a choice to be miserable. The people are not oppressed, according to Blake, but depressed. Not sad, but sorry for themselves and he seems to withhold the full sum of his pity for them as a result.
Everywhere he looks, he sees abandon, which frustrates Blake who finds himself cornered by misery everywhere he goes. Presumably his nasal and taste senses would also have been engaged in his perception of the horrors since he makes specific mention of the ‘chartered’ Thames - itself an indentured servant of The Industrial Revolution - which in the 1790s would have been one of the busiest waterways in the world and so polluted that barely anything barring bacteria could thrive and multiply in its waters. The rot of London’s pollution and the tidal nature of the river would have caused it to stink repulsively, reflecting the festering reality of life on the shore back at itself in mocking disgust. To William Blake, the attitudes in London literally and figuratively stank. Not only did the rich possess sufficient hubris to believe they could tame and commodify Nature herself but, much like in their neglect of the people, they took no more care to preserve God’s natural creations than they did His children, resulting in more pollution and filth in an offensive desecration of another vital but non-renewable resource.
Blake builds his call to arms by layering up the obnoxious sensual experience of walking the streets with details about how all the putrid patheticness is fringed with a cacophony of infernal crying. The anaphora he uses in the repetition of ‘In every’ indicates that the misery is universal and omnipresent, intentionally ramping up the pathos . Even the joyous news of a marriage ‘ban’ being read, is infected by the sounds of anguished dejection which symbolise a lack of hope for the future, since all new unions between the people are doomed to more of the same misery. ‘Crying’ has connotations of begging and powerlessness which betrays the intense fear Blake senses in the people he encounters as if they have resigned themselves to become helpless victims. Men ‘cry’ too which is doubly uncomfortable in patriarchal society that demanded men be strong and resilient protectors. Overall, the idea of men crying dramatically symbolises the emasculation of all of the people, stripping them of their dignity and vitality - as if they are made morally impotent by their circumstances, rendering marital contracts moribund. This apocalyptic sentiment is then echoed in the dramatic final oxymoron ‘marriage hearse’ that suggests that, without drastic action, there is little hope for the future at all.
Blake maintains that, frustratingly, he is made aware that the conditioning the people have been subjected to is actually their only impediment. The memorable metaphor of the ‘mind-forged manacles’ reveals Blake’s conviction that the only thing keeping the people from taking back their power is the belief in their own powerlessness. He believes that the chains of oppression are an illusion ‘forged’ by the Establishment to keep Londoners under control and that, just as the ‘chartered’ Thames could burst its banks and sweep away the city if it was minded to, so the people could choose to rise up and end their own suffering by decapitating Pitt’s government and even King George himself. The laissez-faire attitude of The Establishment who grew fat off the profits generated by England’s poor was too tempting and too abundant a prize to tinker with. As with all of Man’s projects borne of (or attributed principally to) misplaced notions of his own invincibility, few doubted that the gravy train would ever come to a stop, and even if it did, they’d surely be rich enough to ‘charter’ another. Fewer still gave a thought for the silent majority who made up the backbone of the Revolution and without whom there would be no profit to squander.
Despite over eighty percent of the population gleaning minimal benefit from their labours, the illusion of oppression that held them fast in mental bondage and apparently unable to do anything other than to accept their destiny, frustrated thinkers like William Blake. He witnessed the abject deterioration of the moral fabric of society and puzzled over why it seemed impossible for the people to rise up and effect change for themselves. There was certainly precedent for this kind of rebellion. In 1794, when he wrote London, it had been two years since King Louis XVI of France had been guillotined and France’s Revolutionary Reign of Terror had blazed intensely at the heart of Europe for over twelve months. Furthermore, after France declared war on Britain the previous year which meant even higher demands on the public purse and all the while, British opinion had become divided between those who believed the French had set an example to the British people and those who believed what the French Revolution was seeking to achieve should be avoided at all costs. The British government (naturally supporting the latter attitude) responded by using its legislative and judicial powers to suppress radical activity which meant more oppression, suffering and misery for the poor. This, if nothing else, betrayed Pitt’s government’s intense fear of civil unrest at a time and this galvanised poet’s like Blake to be bold and write in the radical ways that they did - in the sure and steady hope of a new Revolution to free the people.
So, in reasoning that a revolution was only a collective act of decisiveness away, Blake was expressing more than enough bolshiness to land himself in the hands of the authorities for sedition without doing what he does next, which is to openly threaten the Monarchy and pillory the Church. Building to a crescendo of spitting anger, he accuses the Church of abandoning its flock and collaborating with the government to line its pockets and further subordinate the people. His heavy use of sibilants and plosive sounds in ‘the hapless soldier’s sigh’ and ‘blackening church appalls’ reveals his disgust for George III in an furious prophecy of doom. As monarch (and also as Head of the Church and Armed Forces), the King had hubristically turned his back on his people to concern himself with Empire building and warmongering in the colonies. Furthermore, Blake uses the acrostic technique ominously spelling HEAR in this stanza which highlights his intention to warn those who refused to listen that they would soon be forced to ‘HEAR’ their own vituperation from the mouths of the people when the metaphorical river of dejected Londoners burst its banks and deluged London with in a vengeful hoard on a Biblical scale.
The third stanza contains the most shocking revelations, perhaps because they are expressed so vividly and literally. He talks of the ‘black’ning church’ suggesting that corruption is causing the mechanisms of charity to become clogged with disease like an unhealthy lung rotting from the inside in an ongoing process of increasingly immoral failure to serve the People. The corruption of the Church is endemic - ‘every’ - and becomes worse and worse as the profits of the Industrial Revolution causes more and more stifling soot and pollution from the belching factory chimneys to stain the crevices of the ornate fascias of holy buildings designed to be a sanctuary for the meek and obedient. He then goes on to envision blood running ‘down palace walls’. This is not stated as a possibility for the future. It is happening in the present tense. It ‘runs’ as if to suggest that violent insurrection is inevitable regardless of how many defend the Monarch.
We perceive Blake’s wholehearted conviction that the end of tyranny is nigh once the people of England match the courage of their brothers in France and America. He was largely unknown in his lifetime which possibly accounts for the bold ownership he exhibits for the radical protest and revolutionary views expressed in his poetry. He had radical friends who were pilloried for theirs (including Thomas Paine who openly criticised the granting of Royal Charters in order to control trade which resulted in further oppression of the poor). Blake was tried (and acquitted) for Sedition in 1803 but not for anything he published and, despite being on the front line of the Gordon Riots that saw an angry mob storm and damaged Newgate Prison in 1780, he lived a full and undisturbed life of an artist, thinker and poet - largely anonymously. Fewer than thirty copies of the anthology containing London had been sold at the time of his death.
The poem ends, as previously mentioned, with a warning that, without change, everything will be indelibly tainted by immorality that threatens even the sanctity of marriage which, in Blake’s view, is the final insult to God. Blake was a spiritual man and had a strong faith that imbued him with strong moral purpose. In the final stanza, Blake - the Romantic - returns to London’s streets to decry the loss of innocence of those most vulnerable in society: women. He then completes his sensory exploration of London with motifs that symbolise the tenderness and vulnerability of touch. Only, in his nightmare perception of the people, he is appalled to discover that where there was once human connection, intimacy and tenderness, touch has now become an aberrant conduit of contagion and vice. The juxtaposition of sin and innocence symbolised on successive lines by his use of ‘harlots’ and ‘new-born infants’ reveal a world where it is impossible to distinguish between the pleas of those in need and those who ‘curse’. It is all one. However, the reader can imagine the scale of the misery because the babies’ ‘tears’ are ‘blasted’ by anger of the women who suffer at the mercy of both poverty and exploitation, sullying both. Blake completes his monologue with a personal plea for men to be real men in Britain’s hour of need and keep to their marriage beds and away from temptation. He also expresses contempt for the consequences of Capitalist greed that normalised the lascivious practices which cultivated the further exploitation of women (already crushed into submission by the Patriarchy) through increasing demand for the services of prostitutes.
In referring to ‘blights’, he is shockingly visceral in his comparison with the fungal decay of living tissue that calls to mind images of rot and this combined with ‘plagues’ creates an allusion to the coming on of divine retribution for a people intractably infected by sin and indecency. The plosive sounds and onomatopoeia he uses in this final stanza in words such as ‘blight’ ‘blast’ ‘curse’ create the impression of outrage so acute it is possible to imagine the speaker foaming at the mouth with revolutionary ire and passion for permanent change.
Blake had a respect for women’s equality that was ahead of his time and would have considered the liberal use of ‘harlots’ repugnant, particularly since they were ‘youthful’ and little more than children themselves. The loss of innocence for any children offended his Romantic sensibilities; female children being exploited for sex by shameless profiteers was more than he could abide. He was devoted to his wife Catherine Boucher who he treated as an equal. When he married her she was illiterate, signing the marriage certificate with a simple cross to show her assent. Blake taught her to read and write and made her his business partner. She worked at his side as an artist and colourist in his engraving business. They had a mutually respectful and deeply loving marriage and Catherine nursed Blake until he died in 1827, declaring he would always be at her side and leaving her everything but not before sketching a final portrait of his ‘angel’ as she sat beside him on his deathbed. His final stanza might therefore be seen as a personal footnote to his plea for a return to the Christian values he deemed crucial to protect an Institution he believed in, and wished to see prevail in spite of the best efforts of the Establishment to drive England and all its people to a Reckoning of its own complacency and moral neglect.
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