Published
in Songs
of Experience in 1794, it is one of the few poems in Songs
of Experience which does not
have a corresponding poem in Songs of Innocence.
The poem has a total of sixteen lines which are
split into 4 stanzas with a rhyming ABAB pattern throughout the poem. Repetition is the most
striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence
of the horrors the speaker describes.
I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
William Blake's poem is obviously a sorrowful poem. It describes
the deplorable condition of his hometown, London, post the French Revolution
and post-industrialisation of the 18th century. By reason of overpopulation,
unhealthy working conditions and a generally squalid environment, London was
plagued with poverty, disease, harlots and an exhausted working class.
Blake expresses sympathy for the working class of London, stating how they are
“marked” with signs of sadness, “weakness,” “woe,” and grief. Blake’s
poem is his own personal “mark” of sorrow of the London he once
loved. Blake’s working class characters were “marked” by their dejection (=despair, discouragement), due to the rise of industrialisation in London. The chimney-sweepers,
soldiers, and harlots were all entirely uprooted from their familiar
environments of self-support from an economy based on agriculture to
a modern urban world dominated by coal production,
machinery, and division of labor. It is
with the use of three distinct metaphors - "mind-forg'd
manacles", "blackning Church" and "Marriage hearse"
- that Blake conveys the idea of a city that suffers from physical and
psychological imprisonment, social oppression, and a morally corrupt society. This poem, brutal and harsh (=cruel, merciless) in its message, has
significance even in modern times in societies where there is poverty due to
large discrepancies in incomes between the rich and the poor.
Focussing on the text:
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