William Blake's “London” is a lament for all of the visible sufferings of humanity in its patronymic city. Despite the name of the poem, its content seems to focus mostly on the ability of humanity to sin regardless of its consequences unto others as well as the plight of the lower class. At the height of England's industrialization, urbanization has come into effect and the cities are filled with the impoverished, hoping to find work or relief from more traditional rural roles. With this transition comes social decay in all its forms, which in the poem range from the greed of the monarchy paid for in blood by soldiers to the uncaring prostitute whose child has inherited her inflictions. In “London,” Blake uses these specific instances to underline a statement about the callousness and apathy of humanity.
The first stanza of the
poem serves mostly as an introduction. The
narrator refers to both the streets of London and the
Thames as “
chartered” in the first two lines, a judgmental nod of the head to our enterprising nature (on a contextual note, the granting of “
royal charters” to companies, of which the
British East India Company is a memorable example, was criticized at the time by Thomas Paine for being little more than a means for class oppression). Neither the
streets of the city, a human construct, or the
river, an entirely
natural construct, is free from the binds of
commercial interests. He follows this immediately with “And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe,” tying those two thoughts together. Already, in the first four lines of the poem, one of its major themes is clear: the
greater good is heavily compromised under the hand of the ruling class.
Following this, in the second stanza, the narrator becomes slightly more vague. A
general discontent in the poem's cast remains: the narrator states “In every cry of every
Man, / In every Infants cry of fear, / In every voice: in every ban, / The
mind-forged manacles I hear.” Here he again connects the “mind-forged manacles,” quite literally the binds placed (also mentioned in the form of “bans,” various prohibitive decrees) on the citizens by the upper class, to the various plights of the
Londoners. The first “cry” of the stanza may also be interpreted as an
announcement or advertisement by the citizens, who grow increasingly desperate under increasing economic pressure. The meter stands out in this stanza more than that of any other: while the entire poem is in
iambic tetrameter, the repetition of “in every” in the first three lines of this stanza creates an interesting emphasis on the succeeding words somewhat akin to the effect of
polysyndeton, making the reader believe that the narrator experiences some sort of exasperation in that
repetition.
More
specific condemnations follow in the third stanza. For the sake of analysis, I will separate this stanza into its component clauses, “How the Chimney-sweeper's cry / Every blackening
Church appals” and “and the hapless Soldier's sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls.” The first clause is a particularly interesting one. The narrator directly correlates the
chimney-sweep, often an
impoverished or
orphaned child who has been chosen to clean chimneys despite extreme associated health risks, with the “blackening” of the Church. “
Blackening” may be interpreted as either a transitive or intransitive verb, lending to the simultaneous interpretation that the corruption inside of the Church is itself responsible for the Church's increasingly irrelevant or even malignant role in society. The connection between these two ideas specifically blames the inability for large societal institutions to execute any sort of meaningful social change, in this case the church, for the
social decay that the narrator observes throughout the poem. Clergy are not Blake's only target here, however. The second clause of the stanza is much more of a direct condemnation, as he attacks the royalty of Britain for manipulating their constituents for their own means (a common theme in
civilization, it seems). In saying that the soldier is “
hapless,” he nearly echoes some
Marxist sentiment that the monarchy's membership found their way their by chance, or, more strictly, that the soldier is simply unfortunate for being used up by the
monarchy.
The fourth
stanza is much more abrupt than the others in its message, although the theme
persists. Blake presents the most specific
scenario here: “But most through midnight streets I hear / How the youthful
Harlot's curse / Blasts the new born Infant's tear, / And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.” A prostitute, by the virtue of her own choices, has infected her husband and child with either vague divine retribution for her crimes affecting her fortune or, more strictly, the actual
diseases with which she's been afflicted. In this stanza an interesting thing occurs: while societal institutions have been the target of Blake's accusations for the first part of the poem, personal (as opposed to institutional) responsibility receives more blame in this scenario. While her unspecified affliction is described as a “
curse,” the fact that she has put herself in this role by her own choices is inescapable, granted that, conversely,
poverty could be said to force them into those roles. Consequently, we arrive at two quite divergent interpretations of the poem. The first
interpretation blames societal institutions unrelentingly for the social decay that the narrator observes, while the second interpretation is more of a
metacommentary, describing the tendency of humans to blame others than themselves for their problems, especially when those blamed are, for all practical purposes, faceless. While these two interpretations are quite different, that's not that say that they're irreconcilable. Perhaps both observations were intended to be
communicated.
An interesting thing to note, perhaps lending itself slightly to the “
scapegoat” interpretation, is that the poem is entirely observational. The narrator describes no interaction with any of the parties mentioned in the poem, and no personal acquaintances of any type are described in the poem,
l'un sans l'autre, the narrator's plight may be transcribed. In some cold,
industrial, impersonal city, the symptoms of alienation and apathy begin to arise at the onslaught of social decay.