"London"
by William Blake (1757-1827)
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And 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 blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
*Orlando Ricardo Menes comments:
From his *Songs of Experience*, William Blake's "London" is one of those unforgettable poems that grips, clamps the reader with the tenacity of truth, a truth that we instinctively recognize and surrender to with a profound sense of life's tragedy. We confront with horror this London that is imploding from the privations of liberty, the abandonment of morals, although we recognize that Blake's city transcends time, transcends place, and thus we can easily replace London with Calcutta, Nairobi, or Bogotá. "London" is a poem that I memorized more than twenty years ago, which has inspired several of my own, and one that I feel compelled to recite to my students. To this day the poem's vision sears me, the rhythms pound, drub my ear, and my mind is troubled, my whole body tremulous.
Quatrain One: The first use of "charter'd" alludes to the well-known Magna Carta, the "chartered rights of Englishmen," though these were withheld from ordinary citizens (let us not forget that Blake himself, an engraver by trade, struggled in the urban working class) by the repressive government of the younger William Pitt who was prime minister in 1794, the year "London" first appeared in print. (Though the reference is temporal, the indictment of tyranny transcends time and place.) Also, in the sense of commercial chartering, the word is a powerful denunciation of the citizens' dispossession of the very streets on which they walk, as opposed to the natural chartering, or bounding, of the Thames River. The roving eye of the seer marks "weakness" and "woe" in every passerby, and the repetition of "mark" (both as noun and verb), as well as the trochaic substitution and medial caesura of the fourth line, punctuate the marks' indelible and disfiguring nature.
Quatrain Two: While the first quatrain stresses the visual attributes of the poet-prophet, the *vates*, this second stanza focuses on the auditory. The periodic structure of the sentence not only elongates the "sound" of the human landscape but also makes the image of the "mind- forg'd manacles" even more surprising and resonant. This abstract image (as opposed to the more deliberately political "german forg'd" of Blake's first draft) conceptualizes the manacles not only as something real and tangible but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a state of mind that creates the privation of liberty. The repetition (four times) of the phrase "in every" reverberates like the tolling of bells, those associated with marriage ("ban") and those that foreshadow the final stanza's "Marriage hearse," surely one of the most powerful oxymorons in English poetry. While the voicing of the "ban" alludes to political oppression, the cries of fear are more primal, more intrinsic to our human (fallen) nature, and thus the more disturbing, the more disquieting because they cannot be easily remedied through political or social action.
Quatrain Three: Chimney sweepers were certainly among the most exploited child laborers in Blake's England, whose lives, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, were short, nasty, and brutal. These were young boys, orphaned from their mothers, who then were sold into bondage by their own fathers to the English church. The stanza recalls "The Chimney Sweeper" poems found in both the *Songs of Innocence* and the *Songs of Experience*. In the latter, for example, the boy speaker wears "the clothes of death" and cries "weep, weep, in notes of woe." The verb "appalls" in line 10 bears both a moral condemnation of the Church and an image of the chimney sweeper's impending and unnatural death. The boy's "cry" parallels the "hapless soldier's sigh," just as the Church parallels the Crown as agents of abuse and oppression. The latter's culpability is made explicit in the scathing image (synesthesia) of the sigh "run[ning] in blood down palace walls." Substitute Crown with Fuhrer, Il Duce, Caudillo, Máximo Líder, etc., and one has Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Falangist Spain, and Castroist Cuba.
Quatrain Four: The *vates* returns to the streets of the first stanza, though now at the more critical time of night during which he witnesses the moral corruption of the city. Just as in the previous two stanzas, the imagery is auditory, and thus the harlot's "curse" is the calling out (the "cursing out") of her trade, with its loaded freight of blasphemy and imprecation, this utterance that "blasts" like some scouring wind the innocent "new-born Infant's tear," an image that alludes to blinding venereal disease, which was, of course, rampant at the time. It should be noted that the "youthful Harlot" is very much a child herself, and thus perhaps she is both victim and victimizer. While poverty surely underlies her situation, the poem does not spare her from culpability (in the sense of free will). The poem too refuses to ameliorate the corruption of sin, and it concludes with the terrifying image, suggesting divine punishment, of the curse "blight[ing] with plagues the Marriage hearse."
ORLANDO RICARDO MENES was born in Lima, Peru, to Cuban parents but has lived most of his life in the U.S. Since 2000, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Chelsea, Callaloo, Indiana Review, and New Letters, among others. Besides his own poems, Menes has published numerous translations of such poets as the Argentine Alfonsina Storni and the Cuban José Kozer. His most recent collection of poems is *Furia* (Milkweed Editions). Menes is also editor of the anthology *Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred*, published in 2004 by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe at Arizona State University.
