London

In his poem "London," William Blake refers to the streets of London, and to the river, as being "charter'd." This could have several meanings: first of all, a chartered street is one that has been...

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...

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...

Romanticism, a literary movement that flourished in England from 1785 to 1830, had five primary characteristics. Romantic writers celebrated nature, imagination, the common man and childhood, the...

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...

William Blake’s “London” presents a first person speaker remarking upon the misery of London life in a strongly emotional manner. This is an instance of the “spontaneous overflow of powerful...

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...

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...

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, 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...

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...

In this short poem, Blake makes sweeping condemnations of repressive systems or institutions in a compressed way. This appears most strikingly in stanza four: Every blackning Church appalls, And...

I believe that Blake wrote this poem to decry the state of people in the urban centers of his time. He argues, in the poem, that people in the cities are really badly off in a number of ways. In...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

William Blake's "London" is a short poem in which the speaker describes a walk through London streets. Blake begins the poem by thoroughly identifying the setting as London (although he also does...

The first stanza already expresses a negative tone, for the speaker notes that as he wanders through the mapped streets of London, he perceives on every face that he meets, 'Marks of weakness,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Formal elements in poetry might include the poem's theme, type of diction, rhythm, meter, rhyme scheme, and so on, as well as any figures of speech the poet uses. In this poem by Blake, we can...

William Blake wrote the poem "London" in the midst of Great Britain's Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. This transformed Great Britain into a worldwide leader of commerce. It created...

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...

This poem is one of the "Songs of Experience" written by William Blake that contrasts with his "Songs of Innocence." While Songs of Innocence took an optimistic and positive view of life and...

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...

William Blake’s “London” is a poem about contemporary life at the time as it is characterized by certain forces that affect social, intellectual and spiritual life. The city, London, is used to...

William Blake's poem "London," like many of his other poems, serves as a critique of the dehumanizing effect of the Industrial Revolution and the "dark Satanic mills" on "England's green &...

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...

"London", a poem by William Blake, was published in Blake's book Songs of Experience in 1794. It therefore describes the city of London during the late eighteenth century and reflects the changes...

One of the most pleasing aspects of poetry and poets (and William Blake's London is no exception) is it's timelessness - a poem written hundreds of years ago can sound as if the poet is actually...

In William Blake's "London," the speaker describes the city of London, England, as a sad and oppressive place. He says that every person's face has "Marks of weakness" and of "woe" (line 4). Even...

William Blake, born in 1757, came of age at the outset of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760 to 1820), which was marked by an unprecedented population increase, a drop in living conditions for...

Any great city is a mixture of squalor and splendor, but in this poem Blake concentrates exclusively on the squalor. “London” shows the capital as a place so full of human misery that even the...

We can easily see that the poem "London" belongs to the Experience side of this incredible collection of poems through its tone and subject. One of the characteristics of the Songs of Experience in...

Four Romantic elements in "London" include, first, the idea that the misery that humans suffer from is man made. Blake's speaker is clear that "mind-forg'd manacles" or handcuffs created by human...