London - William Blake (1794) - Stance's analysis

Extract

[...] The third stanza keeps the focal point on the sonority and melody that Blake manages to hear as he tours the city of London streets. In order to prove his point, he then gives different examples of people who he believes are being made slaves by the British judicial and economical systems, by religion and even by the monarchs themselves. As the state religion, the Church of England is, according to him, responsible for every cry coming out of each chimney in London. [...]

[...] The bitter and severe critique that Blake addresses at the English monarchy, the church, and the legal system is of paramount importance while analysing this poem, it is the core of Blake's poem. Blake reinforces its poem significance by having the narrator walks through the streets of London, which compels the reader to be confronted to everyday struggles, sufferings and human decadence. He makes the reader, hear pain, see pain and thus feel the pain of a falling human nature. [...]

[...] London - William Blake (1794) - Stance's analysis "London" is quite a short poem; it's made up of sixteen lines composed of four stanzas of alternately rhyming short lines. "London" is part of the "Songs of Experience" which is part of William Blake's larger piece, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) and is part of Blake's depiction of immoral human nature. Blake concentrates his concern on the condition of London, England, the capital of the country, both geographically and culturally. [...]

[...] "London" is looking like a pretty common and simple poem, mainly because the language used is blunt, the lines are short, and the scenery takes place in the everyday life. Nevertheless the poem is pretty powerful in the sense that Blake covers many different aspect and people of the society. Blake criticises law, monarchs, government and religion, one after the other, describing how all of them negatively affect human nature. The poem makes London looks like a very modern and dehumanized in a way, made of buildings, with no reference to nature (except for the River Thames). [...]

[...] The author describes that everywhere he looks he can observe and recognize so much pain and sadness in people. The second stanza describes what Blake hears while he goes around London and what he describes as its dangerously harming avenues where people cry, fear and struggle. The narrators describes individual suffering and misery, nevertheless he also stresses out the fact that the legal system also diminishes overall freedom. According to him and how he highlights it as the second stanza finishes, laws in general decrease human imagination, contaminates human soul and foul human heart and true nature. [...]