Commentary about London by William Blake free essay sample

London, which consists of sixteen lines, is not just a description of William Blake’s birthplace but also a detailed poem of how the social status works in London. The poem is a devastating and concise political analysis delivered with passionate anger. It is revealing the complex connections between patterns of ownership and the ruling ideology, the way all human relations are inescapably bound together within a single destructive society. The reason why Blake wrote it was because he believed that the human spirit was being suppressed by custom and politics. His idea in the poem was that humanity could flower if long-established institutions could be altered or removed. For this reason his poem â€Å"London† is revolutionary because it stresses the need to correct the misery the speaker describes. Those who are degraded should be healthy and wholesome. By contrast, Blake reminds us in the poem of privilege, soldiers, and palaces, all of them aspects of oppressive authority. We will write a custom essay sample on Commentary about London by William Blake or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Songs of Experience, from which â€Å"London† was taken, was a collection of poems on this basic theme. Blake published the work in 1794; the French Revolution was only five years old at the time, with his own engravings. The poem’s opening shows the narrator wandering the â€Å"charter’d† streets of London down to the â€Å"charter’d Thames†. The loaded word â€Å"charter’d† is used in a critical sense, and Blake’s contemporary readers would no doubt have picked up on it. The first two lines of the first verse talks about how the ruling class not only controls the street but also the river that should be flowing freely. The repetition of the word â€Å"mark† is emphatic; the Londoners are branded with visible signs of sickness and misery. There is a biblical sense at work here, as in the mark of the Beast from Revelations, or the mark of Cain, the murderous â€Å"builder of the first city†. The subtle shift from â€Å"mark† used as a verb in line three to a noun in line four binds the narrator to those he sees, showing he is not a disinterested observer but one of the sufferers himself. The repetition also shows the despair and tiredness that the Londoners seem to be going through because of their oppressed way of life. In the second verse of the poem, the commonality of suffering was shown in the repetition of the word â€Å"every†. It also stressed the people’s feelings of being imprisoned and trapped. The verse is also a picture of a society in chains and the tightness of the poem revealed the feelings of entrapment. The word â€Å"ban† tells that they lack freedom of expression. It reveals how people were unable to voice their criticisms or how the country was being ruled. The â€Å"I† figure doesn’t appear till the very end of the verse, as if he has been overwhelmed by the sounds of human torment. The sense of imprisonment is made absolutely plain in the phrase â€Å"mind-forg’d manacles†. Metaphorically, mental chains imprisoning through ideological acceptance of the status quo. The long list of accusatory examples gave an unstoppable momentum in the third verse of the poem. The â€Å"Chimney-sweepers† represent the destitute children. The â€Å"Soldiers† represent the anguish of those who had to serve in the army under difficult conditions. The three specific social types – the chimney sweep, the soldier and the harlot – all emblematic figures, a point made clear by the use of capitals, was used also for the representative institutions. The tone of the author at this moment is stark and accusatory. The boy sweep was a well-known figure of pity in Blake’s time. The word â€Å"appalls† here means indicts rather than the modern usage of disgusts. The church is not appalled in a compassionate way, but is fearful of the menace the sweeps represent. On the last verse of the poem, Blake told a story of a young girl out in the darkness. At that time, young women had to resort to prostitution because of poverty. Blake wrote that he could hear the young girl’s curse for what she has to be put through. By striking at the family, the poem attacks the reproductive system of society itself. The harlot’s curse does more than make the baby cry; it destroys bourgeois complacency. The â€Å"plagues† signifies the goings of the rich and how their actions affect the lives of the entire innocent involved. The poem â€Å"London† gave a very specific description of the way of life in London at Blake’s time period. The final idea of this poem is the claim of a free society, without any chains, without any kind of ideological condition. The message is to be free yourself from the restriction of your own mind and the conceptions to be able to find freedom.