William Blake's Dark Vision Of London

The visionary artist and poet William Blake had a love-hate relationship with London, where he lived for virtually all his life. Though he savored the energy, diversity, and dynamism that made the city great in the late 1700s, he couldn't help but see its dark side too, the pervasive suffering of so many Londoners. In 1792, Blake wrote a short poem called simply that captures with alarming clarity the dark side of his home city. Let's read it stanza by stanza and see, or rather hear, what he heard in the metropolis outside his door. We get a lot in this first stanza. First off, we get the structure, a quatrain of iambic tetrameter with an ABAB rhyme scheme. The poem consists of four of these quatrains, 16 lines in total. Blake also sets the scene here. The speaker is wandering through the streets of London, noticing the sadness and depravity all around him. We also get a lot of word repetition in this stanza, echoing the heartbeat repetition of the meter. Clearly, this repetition is important to the theme, but we'll find out what that is a little later. For now, let's zero in on the word chartered, a curious word to describe a street and a river. In an earlier version of the poem, Blake used the word dirty instead, but that word's only descriptive. With chartered, he conveys something deeper, a city in which the very streets are owned and controlled. As Blake's friend, the effectively takes rights away from the many and places them in the hands of the few. As the industrial revolution sweeps through London at the end of the 1700s, the speaker sees freedoms curtailed and life commodified. Even the river, a natural feature, is commodified. This restrictive environment is the source of the marks of weakness and woe he sees. Obviously, the repetition has intensified. Three of these lines start with in plus a fourth here. The word cry is used twice and every a whopping five times. This is also the only stanza where the meter is perfectly regular, without any variation. These things make the quatrain feel like a heartbeat, a never-ending da-dun, da-dun, in every cry of every man, in every infant's cry of fear, from which it's impossible to escape. Aside from this, the thing that jumps out here is mind-forged manacles, one of Blake's most famous phrases. The speaker suggests that it's not just the institutions and the powerful that imprison the suffering masses, but manacles that are self-imposed. People imprison themselves with their own ignorance and superstition. They are oppressed from without and within, and the external tyrants, kings, organized religions, slave owners, landlords, exploitative industrialists, misogynists, all of whom Blake despised, by the way, all these tyrants use people's ignorance as a tool to exercise repressive control. Change requires mass education as much as it does a reform of institutions. Both are extremely heavy lifts, and the speaker of the poem doesn't seem optimistic. How the chimney sweepers cry, every blackening church appalls, and the hapless soldier's sigh runs in blood down palace walls. In stanza three, the speaker gets specific, linking two examples of suffering people with the powers that cause or enable their suffering. The connection between the second one is more obvious, so let's start there. The British nobility in their palaces decide to wage wars like the American Revolutionary War, which had recently ended, or the French Revolutionary Wars, which were just beginning at the time Blake wrote this poem, but do so with the blood of soldiers, ordinary people who have little choice in the matter. All the hapless, unfortunate soldier can do is sigh. Though blood running down palace walls may also suggest that you can only push people so far. The storming of the Bastille in 1789, the symbolic spark of the French Revolution, was fresh in the minds of the British populace and the British nobility. When King Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793, it showed that royalty can bleed too. Okay, so what's the connection between chimney sweepers and the church? At this time in London, those who did the dirty, dangerous work of sweeping chimneys were often children, as young as six, many orphaned, who were small enough to fit in those tight spaces. The church is supposed to protect and support orphan children, the most vulnerable among us, and yet churches were often responsible for apprenticing orphan children out to do such work. The children, blackened by soot, blackened the church in turn by revealing their hypocrisy, and that hypocrisy is baked right into the language. To be appalled is to be dismayed or horrified, but an older meaning is to make pale. The church turns black and white at the same time. One is the perception and one the reality. But most through midnight streets I hear how the youthful harlot's curse blasts the newborn infant's tear and blights with plagues the marriage hearse. Blake ends the poem with an ambiguous but startling image. Okay, let's say there are five people here, the speaker, the harlot, the newborn, a husband, and a wife. It's unclear who the infant belongs to here, the harlot and the husband, or the married couple. Either way, the which some have taken to mean that the harlot or prostitute gives the child a venereal disease directly or indirectly, passing it to the husband who passes it to the wife who passes it to the child. As a result, the curse blights or infects the marriage as well, turning the marriage coach into a marriage hearse, ending the poem on a two-word phrase that fuses a beginning with an ending. Symbolically, the speaker criticizes the institution of marriage, an institution that combines church and state, which he criticized separately in the previous stanza. Though Blake was himself happily married, he believed that marriage for status or money, which he saw all the time all around him, was often very repressive, especially for women who were expected to deny their sexual freedom in favor of a misogynistic image of virginal purity. Such repression, such sexism created the demand for prostitution, a class of vulnerable and exploited women who then go on to blight these sexless, loveless marriages, and eventually the legitimate or illegitimate children they create. It's astonishing how Blake so succinctly conveys this circularity, a system in which moralism, repressive institutions, and people's own ignorance perpetuate suffering down the generations. The poem is itself circular, with the newborn infant's tear shooting you right back up the poem to the infant's cry, and the second stanza where you have this steady, unremitting, iambic tetrameter. Blake is probably best known today for his prophetic religious visions and drawings, but London is an example of his genius turning a fiery gaze on the society around him, where in 16 lines he paints a portrait of reality that looks and sounds a lot like hell. Hey everybody, happy Halloween and thank you so much for watching. So I just noticed that as of Halloween 2023, the hardcover of my book of essays is on sale on Amazon for just $8.39. If you haven't read the book yet and are interested, this is a really great deal, and I have no clue how long it's going to last, so I just thought that I would let you know. This episode was brought to you by Squarespace. If you don't know, Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. 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