Explore how William Blake presents the life of the city in 'London' and make connections with one or two poems from your collection.
William Blake presents the life of the city in ‘London’ and ‘The Chimney sweeper’ (Experience) in various ways. Blake lived in the city of London, so he understood the suffering that happened there, for everybody shown in ‘London’, and for Chimney-sweeper, shown on ‘The chimney-sweeper’ (Experience). They differ in their structure and rhyme scheme, but are similar in lots of ways, for instance they are both from the Book of Experience, published in 1794 by Blake himself, who engraved and drew art for each of his work as well, but was not well received during his life-time.
London is about the narrator, Blake walking down the streets of London and seeing everyone suffering and living in poverty. He blames this on the government and Church, as Blake didn’t like organised religion; he had a more personal relationship with God, and he believed that the church was not helping the poor. The chimney Sweeper (Ex) is about a young child who has been abandoned by his parents, who have prioritised the church over their child, again emphasising Blake’s view that the life of the city has been overcome and turned evil by the church. London consists of 4 stanzas with 4 lines each, and these lines are varied in length, emphasising the variety of life in the city. It is a narrative structure, so it is therefore a form of a ballad, a style of poem that was popular in Blake’s time. The poem also uses enjambment, like ‘I hear how the chimney-sweeper’s cry’, and along with the lack of punctuation (there is only 4 commas and 1 full stop), this makes the poem have a fair-paced feel, with no chance to pause, stop for break and reflect, symbolising the city’s never ending suffering. The Chimney sweeper, however, has 3 stanzas and 4 line, which are short showing how the child has no opportunity to think for himself; he is instead overcome by church forcing him to be one of the homeless people in the city.
London consists entirely of declaratives, like “I wander through’ each chartered street’, so that the reader can’t think of their own interpretation of the city; Blake is expressing what he sees in the city as fact and the only truth of London. The Chimney sweeper also consists mainly of declaratives, but there is also the interrogative ‘where are thy mother and father? Say?’ to create the voice of a child who questions the truth of London and is optimistic, however the declarative ‘they have both gone up to the church to pray’ shows that he has accepted his fate.
London has an angry, bitter, devastated tone created by the various dynamic verbs, like ‘hear’, ‘cry’, ‘sigh’, ‘curse’ using the readers sense to create a physical image
of how real the people of London’s suffering is due to poverty. The lexical field of London, like ‘Thames’ and ‘Palace’ uses deictic references to uses famous parts of London that most people are aware of and showing the bad things about it, destroying the reader’s positive view of the city by showing it’s true nature; everyone is forced to do physical labour and the streets are full of the sounds of pain and exhaustion. The noun phrase ‘youthful harlots’ create a more specific picture for the reader by shocking them by juxtaposing the lively adjective ‘youthful’ with the taboo lexis ‘harlots’, suggesting that the city is morally wrong and dirty. The chimney sweeper also has a lost, broken, lonely tone, however there are some notes of optimism due to the child’s trust in God, shown by the contrast of negative abstract nouns like ‘woe’ and ‘misery’ with positive abstract nouns like ‘heaven’ and ‘God’, however due to Blake’s disagreement with organised religion through his suggestion through in the Innocence version of The Chimney sweeper that all the children in London have hope in God contrasted with their torture and pain being forced to clean chimneys, this is likely to be ironic and be or instead saying that the church has created the pain of the children in the city. The Chimney sweeper (Ex) also uses the lexical field of London, including ‘Thames water’, and the lexical field of parenting, like ‘clothed’ and ‘taught’ to guilt the reader by creating the image that this is their children who are suffering.
London uses an ABAB rhyme scheme and an iambic tetrameter rhythm to create an image of a familiar, upbeat city, that most people would expect a city to be, so that he can contrast it with the horrific content of the poem to defy the readers expectations and to show, brutally the suffering of London. The poem uses repetition a lot, including the repetition of words ‘marks’ ‘chartered’, and ‘infant’, to create the image that the people who suffer the most in London is the children, whose fate is mapped out for them by the church and who are marked, both physically through labour due to sweeping, and figuratively through the church’s decision not to help them, permanently. ‘Infants’ is also capitalised to make this collective noun stand out in order to shock the reader that people so young have been left to die in the city. ‘The chimney sweeper’ starts off with an AABB rhyme scheme in the first stanza, and then in the 2nd and 3rd stanza has an ABAB rhyme scheme, with an iambic tetrameter rhythm throughout. This created an unbalances, uneasy feeling in the reader, and while through the change in rhyme scheme the child has become less controlled and more lively through no longer being controlled and repressed by his parents and the church, it also suggests through the uneasy tone that this cannot sustain itself, making the reader fear for the future of the child and therefore the future for all those in London. Repetition is used in ‘weep weep’ to use onomatopoeia to create the image of the children never stopping crying, making the reader want to help them, showing how Blake is calling for people to help the poor as the church won’t. He also repeats the noun ‘snow’ to emphasise the cold setting both physically as in winter, the homeless suffer greatly in cities, and figuratively as he has been abandoned and is unloved by anyone else in the city.
London uses various imagery to create the picture of life in the city of London, including the syntactic parallelism and metaphor ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’ which emphasises the permanence of those in the city’s suffering and pain, and that everyone in London, including future generations, are marked by the church’s unwillingness to help and will always be doomed. The metaphor ‘runs in blood down palace walls’ is a very brutal harsh and gory image that suggests that the government, monarch and church, through the deictic reference ‘palace’ symbolising power, has blood on their hands and is responsible for the suffering in the city, and will be stained by this lack of empathy forever. Blake uses the anaphora of ‘in every’ to list all of the people who have suffered and to emphasises the magnitude of the problems in the city, creating a hopeless tone. He also uses the metaphor ‘plagues the marriage hearse’ to contrast the positive, celebratory abstract noun ‘marriage’ with the noun ‘hearse’ that represents a funeral car and the permeant suffering of the verb ‘plagues’ to suggest that all happiness in London is stained and overcome by the magnitude of the suffering. The chimney sweeper uses different techniques to create a similar idea, as the syndetic listing of ‘happy and dance and sing’, while using positive dynamic verbs to show the optimism of the child, is ironic due to the contrast of the child’s abandonment and suffering alone in the city, therefore Blake is suggesting that the child’s naivety has been abused by the church. The religious metaphor ‘who make up a heaven of our misery’ uses the contrast of the abstract noun ‘heaven’ symbolic of a perfect place free of suffering, with the negative abstract noun, ‘misery’ to suggest that the church use the suffering of all the children in the city to benefit themselves, and that they keep all the money for themselves purposefully and maliciously, making the reader angry at the government and church, and want to help. The alliteration of ‘happy upon the heath’ creates an upbeat, lively rhyme to again emphasises the child’s optimism, making the reader feel both reassured that the child is still happy , but also angry that he’s being manipulated, creates the idea that those in the city still believe that the church and government will help them, but they are alone.
Achieved in timed conditions and marked by the exam board, this is what they would expect for full marks.
Mark: 32/32
Examiner comments (off-side comments):
‘Perceptive and well-developed critical analysis. Context sound. Level 6’
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