London

The rhythm, meter and rhyme scheme of this poem are almost deceptively straightforward. The poem comprises four stanzas, with the rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF DGDG. There is some element of...

The tone of a poem is the emotion it communicates. The tone of Blake's poem is one of bleak and hopeless sadness at the distress he sees everywhere in London. Blake conveys this sadness at the...

The "marriage hearse" appears in the last line of Blake's poem. The image is deeply ambiguous. First, it conflates two opposites. Marriage is associated with beginnings, procreation, and a kind of...

William Blake is playing with words with the term mark. He is using the word both as a verb and as a noun. To mark is to notice, but it can also refer to a physical mark, like a birthmark or the...

A more complete version of this quote is as follows: And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. In general, the last line of the quote is saying that the "Palace," the...

The speaker says that he hears the "mind-forg'd manacles" in the cry of every man, every infant, every voice. This is our first clue that something figurative is going on here, as we would be much...

William Blake published "London" in 1794 in his Songs of Experience. The French Revolution had taken place just five years earlier, and this caused lawmakers in England to pass new laws that would...

How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse The meaning of these three lines seems to be this. If men consort with prostitutes...

We're not William Blake, of course. We can't say for sure what he's referring to when he uses the phrase "mind-forg'd manacles." However, if we look at the context of the phrase and the general...

William Blake's poem, "London," presents a stark and bleak image of England's capital city. Dark and oppressive, the city is both the stage and the mechanism of indoctrination, crushing the spirit...

William Blake's "London" presents the eponymous city of London as a dark, hopeless, miserable, and poverty-stricken place. The speaker references children, or "Infants," twice in the poem. He does...

His view of humanity in this poem is, to say the least, bleak and desperate. Blake seeks to provide a portrait of Londoners, particularly members of the lower-class, struggling to survive in the...

Romanticism is characterized by the glorification of nature, the celebration of the individual, and the emphasis on imagination and emotion. So, with "London" we don't see those themes overtly. But...

Blake's poem is part of his collection called Songs of Innocence and of Experience. While often thought of as children's poems, their larger purpose is to articulate Blake's vision of reality, in...

In the context of the whole poem, "blackning" appears to have just as much of a figurative meaning as it does a literal one, and both are connected to the chimney sweepers referenced in the...

William Blake's poem "London" shows how this city, the supposed center of culture, actually embodies the wasted potential of humanity. In the first stanza, the speaker notes that the streets and...

In his poem about London, William Blake cries out against privilege, rank, wealth, church and establishment on behalf of the poor, the destitute and the enslaved. I think you are definitely on the...

Blake's "London" present a bleak portrait of life in the capital city. The speaker notes marks of "weakness" and unhappiness in "every" face he sees as he walks the city's streets. His London is...

Both William Blake and William Wordsworth were first-generation Romantic poets who wrote during the French Revolution. This war caused upheaval in other parts of Europe and in Britain from 1789 to...

Blake's "London" was featured in his collection Songs of Experience, a collection that was a response to his earlier collection entitled Songs of Innocence. As Songs of Experience in general...

Blake, in "London," describes what he sees when he walks through the streets of London just before the turn of the nineteenth century. For context, this was while the French Revolution was...

I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man,In every Infants cry of...

The first two lines of "London" feature repetition, a literary device Blake uses several times in this poem. The word "charter’d," meaning "mapped," is repeated, showing that the city is mapped out...

This is the stanza: In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear-- Blake is saying the world he is describing, one of...

In general, a dramatic monologue is a poem in which a speaker communicates with someone other than the reader. As the term dramatic implies, the address has some theatricality or spectacle. For...

In this poem, the speaker walks through London at the end of the eighteenth century and describes to the reader what he sees and hears. In the second stanza of the poem, the speaker remarks that he...

In “London,” William Blake laments the ubiquitous despair of late–eighteenth-century London. Ravaged by the impersonal effects of the Industrial Revolution (mechanization, rapid economic growth at...

The speaker of the poem "London" shows his anger at the city of London, which represents English civilization, by focusing his attention on its negative features. The people he sees walking in the...

William Blake props up the state and the church as symbols of power in his poem "London." The poem depicts misery in many forms in the city of London, from orphaned children crying out to...

The lines you ask about in Blake's "London" follow: In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban [public pronouncement, announcement of marriage], The...

The imagery in "London" is largely visual or auditory. This means that it conveys sensory information that one can either imagine seeing or hearing, respectively. In the second stanza, the speaker...

The poem is a bitter indictment of the structures that create injustice. By naming the poem after the city and identifying the river as the Thames, he leaves no doubt that he wants the reader to...

Blake presents suffering as pretty universal, at least in the city of London in this era. He implies that there is a clear sense of hopelessness that is experienced by every adult and even by every...

The human suffering and despair that William Blake discusses in his poem “London” unfortunately still exist in the 21st century. Sights and sounds Blake describes parallel social problems we face...

In this poem, Blake criticizes religious and governmental authority. He mentions the "Harlot's curse" in the final stanza. This refers to the spread of syphilis as a venereal disease in London at...

Blake's poem "London" (1794) is perhaps his strongest condemnation of British urban society at the end of the 18thC. Because Blake was born and lived in London his entire life, he saw firsthand the...

In "London," Blake is railing against what he sees as the oppressiveness of modern life. The streets of the city are "charter'd," meaning that they have been mapped. Like all other aspects of...

In the poem "London," the speaker says that as he walks through the city of London, he sees "in every face ... Marks of weakness, marks of woe," and hears, in "every voice," the clinking of...

There are three strong images in "London." All of them are nearly surrealistic, like scenes painted by Salvador Dali. How the Chimney-sweeper's cryEvery black'ning church appals Chimney-sweepers...

While it is possible that the poem could be about other cities, at the time of writing (1794, contained in Blake's collection Songs of Experience), London was one of the largest cities in the...

Blake's poem "London" is the antithesis of his earlier poems in "Songs of Innocence." In the earlier poems, innocent children frolic,nature is in bloom, and people are happy and loving. It is a...

William Blake's poem "London" follows a simple structure that allows the violence and misery of the imagery to be digested more easily. It singsong meter and rhythm and the brevity of the lines...

While both "Ozymandias" and "London" contain critiques on power, these critiques are shaped from radically different angles. Blake's focus is derived first and foremost from the perspective of the...

I'm going to identify three elements of style and literary devices that Blake uses in the poem, defining each, showing you evidence of each in the poem, and then analyzing its significance in the...

A city, company, university, or other entity is "charter'd" (chartered) when it is owned, with certain groups having rights or privileges in it. A "charter" is a paper or contract outlining the...

"London," by William Blake is a Romantic poem. This is not to say that it focuses on a loving or "romantic" relationships between people who feel affection or lust for one another, but, rather,...