The London of William Blake
Rob J. Mann
University of Chicago
October 2021
William Blake lived for all but three of his 69-year life in London. He was born in Soho, died less than half a mile away in Westminster, and is buried in Islington, just across the Thames. Blake was firmly a man of London. The city setting featured prominently in several pieces of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience collections. The narrator in Chimney Sweepers from the Experience poems is walking through a city, while Innocence’s Holy Thursday is overtly set in London (“Till into the high dome of Paul’s/They like Thames waters flow.”). However, in Blake’s lifetime, only once did he choose to make his native city and hometown the unambiguous subject of his work. The single poem that earned this distinction is the eponymous piece, London, part of the Experience collection. London, just 16 lines long, with two distinct but related engraved images, provides a dark view of humanity in the city, levies criticism on church and state—which are both centralized in the city—and raises questions about supposedly hallowed institutions such as marriage.
The poem opens with our narrator walking the “chartered” streets of London, near where the “chartered” Thames River flows. The repetitive use of “chartered” does not let the reader forget that cities are built; they are constructed by man. While Blake warmly describes bucolic scenes in more hopeful poems (the green woods of The Laughing Song, the singing skylark and thrush of The Echoing Green), in London, even the river—the only reference to the natural world in this piece—has been subjugated by humans.
This emphasis through repetition continues as the narrator notes “marks” of weakness and “marks” of woe in faces seen on the street. The dominant image at the top of the poem’s page reinforces this despair, as we see a wizened, hobbling old man being led on crutches through a dark alley by young child. The plight of city peoples sets the stage as the poem adopts a larger voice in the second stanza. If the first stanza felt like the echoing of a lone cello, now the entire orchestra seems to speak. Blake lays down three lines of the crying out of man and infant and all humanity, each line beginning with a rhythmic, “in every…”, and he finishes by pointing us to the source of anguish behind all the cries: the “mind-forged manacles.”
We are not left to wonder long about the nature of those chains forged in the mind, for Blake begins the fourth stanza with a familiar refrain, that of the plight of the chimney sweeper. He seems to quickly link the suffering of these miserable folk with the church itself, saying next, “Every blackening church appalls”. There is no break or even a period separating the sweeper’s cry from this condemnation of the church. If the reader is not already connecting the chimney sweeper’s plight with the church by Blake’s placement of this adjective, then surely the accompanying imagery clears up any doubt. The bottom right quarter of the poem’s page contains what appears to be a young boy, warming himself at a fire. Billowing above the child are plumes of black smoke, seemingly reminding us of the two sides of fire. Yes, the heat from the fire warms and sustains us, but its smoke also plagues and destroys.
This third stanza concludes with a pair of lines about a “hapless” soldier’s sigh and the blood running down palace walls. At the time of the poem, Britain was still reeling from defeat in the “War of American Secession,” and had been drawn into another conflict, this time with France. Blake’s reference to the palace and the blood on the monarchy’s hands levies another accusation at exploitation of the people of the city by a higher authority. The soldier is powerless, sent off to war to die as the king commands.
The final stanza seems narrated as the first, a feeling conjured by the perspective being brought back to individuals at street level, beginning, “…through midnight streets I hear”, not unlike the poem’s first line. But here the narrator says that above all the other miserable cries ringing out in this miserable city, what he hears most is the prostitute’s hollering at her infant child. In these few words (“How the youthful Harlots curse/Blasts the new born Infants tear/And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”), Blake seems to indicate that marriage, a supposed sacred institution of the church and state, is a farce. He points to a city life in which a prostitute’s bastard children are reminders that the institution of marriage is neither sacrosanct nor genuine.
Four years after Blake published his Innocence collection, something compelled him to follow up with the Experience poems, and the contrasting versions of such works as the Chimney Sweeper and Nurse’s Song show us his gift for exploring the duality of perspective and subject. Blake lived 33 more years after completing London, and yet he never chose to publish a different perspective on the city—a less bleak, less condemning view. Perhaps he felt that with the city, there was no other way to see it.
