The Full Text of “London”
1I wander thro' each charter'd street,
2Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
3And mark in every face I meet
4Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
5In every cry of every Man,
6In every Infants cry of fear,
7In every voice: in every ban,
8The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
9How the Chimney-sweepers cry
10Every blackning Church appalls,
11And the hapless Soldiers sigh
12Runs in blood down Palace walls
13But most thro' midnight streets I hear
14How the youthful Harlots curse
15Blasts the new-born Infants tear
16And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
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“London” Introduction
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"London" is among the best known writings by visionary English poet William Blake. The poem describes a walk through London, which is presented as a pained, oppressive, and impoverished city in which all the speaker can find is misery. It places particular emphasis on the sounds of London, with cries coming from men, women, and children throughout the poem. The poem is in part a response to the Industrial Revolution, but more than anything is a fierce critique of humankind's failure to build a society based on love, joy, freedom, and communion with God.
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“London” Summary
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The speaker takes a walk through the designated streets of London. This walk brings the speaker near the River Thames, which seems to have its course dictated for it as it flows throughout the city. The speaker sees signs of resignation and sadness in the faces of every person the speaker passes by.
The speaker hears this pain too, in the cries men as well as those of fearful newborn babies. In fact, in every voice in the city, in every law or restriction London places on its population, the speaker can sense people's feelings of being oppressed by city life.
The speaker hears the cry of young chimney-sweeps, whose misery brings shame on the Church authorities. Thinking of unfortunate British soldiers dying in vain, the speaker imagines their blood running down the walls of a palace.
Most of all, the speaker hears the midnight cries of young prostitutes, who swear and curse at their situation. In turn, this miserable sound brings misery to their tearful new-born children. The speaker also imagines this sound plaguing what the speaker calls "the Marriage hearse"—a surreal imagined vehicle that carries love and death together.
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“London” Themes
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The Oppression of Urban Life
In “London,” the speaker takes a walk through the titular city and finds only misery. The dirty and dangerous city is an intense expression of human life—not at its fullest, but at its most depraved and impoverished. Blake was notably writing at a time when the Industrial Revolution was at full pace, restructuring society in a way that he believed made people lose sight of what it means to be human. Blake uses "London" to argue that this urban environment is inherently oppressive and denies people the freedom to live happy, joyful lives.
The poem opens with the speaker’s experience of walking through the city. Through the speaker’s eyes and ears, the reader gets a strong sense of the dismal lives of the Londoners. The people are “marked” by “weakness” and “woe"; the streets and even the river Thames are “charter’d”—that is, their courses have been decided for them. (Rivers are often a symbol of freedom, but not in this poem.)
The speaker also hears pain everywhere—it’s “in every voice,” even that of newborn babies—and it's caused by “mind-forg’d manacles.” Manacles are a type of physical restraint, like handcuffs, but these particular manacles are “mind-forg’d”—that is, they come from thought rather than the physical world. The root cause of London’s misery, it seems, is the way that humanity thinks about itself, the way that society has been conceived and developed. The speaker suggests that society could be joyful, free, and full of love, but that people's fear, greed, and thirst for power have made the urban environment unbearably oppressive.
Though the poem doesn’t delve too deeply into the way it thinks society should be, it's very clear about the strong links between misery and its urban setting. At the time of Blake's writing London was (and still is) one of the busiest, most developed urban environments in the world. The poem argues that this way of life—with its focus on economic activity and individualism—is fundamentally flawed.
To emphasize the point that the city environment itself oppresses its inhabitants, the speaker gestures towards some of the desperate measures people take in order to survive. The chimney-sweepers, who are only children, put their health at great risk to earn a living; both the soldiers and the harlots (female prostitutes), in different ways, must sell their bodies in order to survive. In other words, everyone is trapped by their situation, forced to exchange the only things they have—their bodies—in order to, paradoxically, keep those bodies alive.
What's more, the poem offers no real hope that society may find a way to cast off its “mind-forg’d manacles.” Note that the poem emphasizes the next generation in closing on the “youthful Harlots” and the “new-born infants.” This image turns what should be a joyous celebration of new life into an initiation into poverty, pain, and hopelessness; it implies the cyclical nature of London's poverty, and suggests people don’t have the freedom to escape their urban woes.
The poem, then, views modern city life as hopelessly oppressive. With the Industrial Revolution at full pace, London was undergoing significant and speedy changes. The poem argues these changes aren't for the better, and its criticism of London may be just as relevant to today’s cities.
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The Corruption of Childhood
"London" also touches on an important theme throughout Blake's work, one that is especially prominent in his Songs of Innocence and Experience: the corruption of childhood. Blake believed that people are born with everything they need for a joyful, loving, and happy life—but that the adult world corrupts this innocent state. In this poem, the speaker describes how children are essentially crushed by the adult world, thus building a vivid argument supporting Blake's broader belief.
The speaker of "London" presents urban children as being in distress from the moment they are born. For example, line 15 describes how newborn babies are "blasted" by the curses of their impoverished prostitute mothers. With this image, the speaker gestures towards an ongoing cycle of misery—miserable mothers lead to miserable children, who may themselves create more miserable children later on—that is integral to the urban environment. Similarly, in line 6, infants are characterized as consistently crying, and these cries are specifically related to the fear they feel. It is as though they can sense the misery around them, before they've even developed their ability to meaningfully perceive and make sense of the world.
Perhaps the most poignant reference to childhood corruption is in line 9, when the speaker discusses the chimney-sweepers. Chimney-sweeping was a brutal but very common profession in London in Blake's day, and it was work that children were frequently sold or forced into. (Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" poems discuss this theme in greater detail.) Like the prostitutes and the soldiers mentioned elsewhere in the poem, the impoverished children of London are forced to exchange their one possession—their bodies—for money, food, and/or lodging. In other words, they give up their childhood—when they should be playing and learning about the world—in order to merely survive. And doing so, of course, actually diminishes their chances of survival, because chimney sweeping places them in toxic and physically dangerous environments.
Through the images of childhood suffering that the speaker observes and recreates for readers, Blake seems to suggest that the oppression of children is one of the worst examples of how the "mind-forg'd manacles" of urban life and industrialization corrupt society.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “London”
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Lines 1-2
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.The opening of the poem sets up its premise: the reader will accompany the speaker on a walk through London, seeing and hearing what the speaker perceives. The verb "wander" makes the walk seem almost casual or aimless. This helps make the misery that follows seem like an everyday kind of misery—this world of poverty and pain is just what people will find in London whenever they walk through it.
Of course, we don't know yet that the city is such a dismal place; instead, these first two lines merely hint at its oppressiveness. To "wander" also suggests a kind of freedom, an idea which is put under strain by the word "charter'd." A charter is a legal document, granting or denying powers or access (to a particular plot of land, for example). In this one word, the speaker suggests what he or she hates most about modern society: the way it restricts and devalues human life. The "charter'd streets" specifically hint at the way London is a kind of cage, keeping its inhabitants within the confines of their pain. The diacope created by the word's repetition in line 2 reflects the way that this cage is inescapable. The streets, then, represent physical city limits that, in turn, hint at the mental limitations of the "mind-forg'd manacles" introduced in line 8.
Line 2 carries on with "charter'd" by now applying it to the Thames. The Thames is the river that flows through London, and it is a key part of the social fabric of the city. It's still pretty dirty now, but back when Blake was writing it would have been even worse—full of filth, waste, and even dead bodies. Here, the Thames acts as a kind of symbol in reverse: rivers are often symbols of natural beauty freedom, but in the poem the Thames only adds to the sense of misery, limitation, and restriction. This symbolic subversion is clear in the grammar of the line itself: The open assonance of "does flow" almost creates a sense of a river running freely, but it is immediately cut short by the harsh end-stop. The punctuation imposes its limits on any short-lived suggestion of freedom.
It's quite possible that the use of "charter'd" is an allusion to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Paine's book was a strong expression of support for the principles of the French Revolution (1789), and in this book he makes a remark that quite possibly informs this poem: "Every chartered town is an aristocratical monopoly of itself." In other words, the layout and organization of a city reflect its imbalance of power, power which is concentrated in the hands of a small ruling class.
Of London specifically, Paine makes another remark whose echo can be found in Blake's poem: "It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic." Worth noting here is that in the poem's first draft, both instances of "charter'd" read "dirty" instead. "Charter'd" must have seemed to better reflect the specific points about London's oppression that Blake wanted the poem to make.
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Lines 3-4
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
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Lines 5-8
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear -
Lines 9-10
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls, -
Lines 11-12
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls -
Lines 13-16
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
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“London” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration occurs in all four stanzas of "London." In lines 3 and 4, the numerous /m/ and /w/ sounds create a sense of abundant misery. Every person the speaker walks past shows "marks" of "weakness" and "woe." The /m/ is associated with these marks, and accordingly the four appearances of /m/ in these lines mirror the way the speaker encounters people on his walk.
In line 8, the /m/ sound appears again. Here, it helps give the phrase "mind-forged manacles" its terrible power. The phrase refers to the oppressive restrictions that humanity places upon itself which, in the speaker's view, are the result of a collective failure to imagine a better society based on love and freedom. The /m/ sound here picks up on the association with misery established in the first stanza, and also helps create a feeling of entrapment. The first word of the phrase starts with /m/ and so does the last, meaning that the phrase itself is in a way surrounded by /m/. It also echoes the /m/ of "Man" in line 5, strengthening the link between the manacles and human beings; the sonic similarity suggests that people are inherently prone to entrapping themselves—that that these shackles aren't simply "mind-forg'd" but also "Man-forg'd," because the oppression of city life is something humanity has created for itself.
In the third stanza, lines 10 and 12 alliterate through the words "blackning" and "blood." Both have negative associations, and both are associated with two of the sources of London's oppression: the official Church and the State/monarchy. The alliteration helps underline the way that society's authorities are directly responsible for people's pain and impoverishment. This is further reflected in the /ch/ consonance of "Chimney" and "Church."
And just as the first two stanzas were linked by the /m/ alliteration, the fourth stanza shares the /bl/ sound with the third stanza. This time it's used for two verbs, both of which describe destruction: "blasts" and "blights." This helps create a sense that this destruction—like the city's oppression—is inescapable. Altogether, the repetition of sounds in the poem thus contributes to the sense that the misery of city-life is cyclical and feeds upon itself.
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Anaphora
Unlock all 222 words of this analysis of Anaphora in “London,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Antanaclasis
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Assonance
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Allusion
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Diacope
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Sibilance
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Metaphor
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Metonymy
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Caesura
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Oxymoron
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“London” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Thro'
- Charter'd
- Thames
- Mark
- Ban
- Mind-forg'd manacles
- Blackning
- Appalls
- Hapless
- Harlots
- Lights
- Hearse
Thro'-
A shortened version of "through."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “London”
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Form
As with many of Blake's poems, "London" has a simple form that furthers a discussion of complicated ideas. There are four quatrain stanzas. Taking a zoomed-out look at these stanzas, the first can be said to deal with the sights of London, while the following three focus instead on the sounds of the city.
Of these, the only one with a particularly inventive form is stanza three. Here, Blake takes the final word of stanza two and uses it to create an acrostic. The first letter of each line in stanza three spells out HEAR, which helps the poem emphasize the sense of sound that the speaker experiences in London. But this formal feature is not immediately noticeable, which reflects the poem's idea that to truly understand the pain and impoverishment of London (and cities like it) takes a deliberate effort.
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Meter
On first glance, "London" is written in iambic tetrameter. Indeed, the first three lines conform to this scheme perfectly:
I wan- | -der thro' | each chart- |-er'd street,
Near where | the chart- | -er'd Thames | does flow.
And mark | in eve- |-ry face | I meetThe poem here is setting up its basic premise—a walk through London—and the regularity of the meter calls to mind the speaker's solid and rhythmic walking pace. But suddenly, this regularity is thrown off by line 4, when the "marks" in people's faces appear in front of the speaker. Their "weakness" and "woe" disrupt the speaker's walking rhythm, and this change is reflected metrically the shortened first foot of the line (technically something called headless catalexis; we could also scan this is being a line made up of trochees and the sound would be the same):
Marks | of weak- | ness, marks | of woe.
This makes the appearance of the people's faces more dramatic, as though they have literally just jumped unexpectedly in front of the speaker's eyes.
What's more, line 4 isn't the only line to cut out the final syllable. Every line in stanza three breaks with iambic tetrameter in the same way, which makes the "chimney-sweepers' cry" and the "hapless soldiers' sigh" more prominent and audible—stressed from the first syllable, the lines feel louder. Lines 14 and 15 employ a form of catalexis too, with an effect similar to that of stanza three. All of these lines scan the same way that line 4 (quoted above) does.
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Rhyme Scheme
"London" follows a simple rhyme scheme throughout:
ABAB
All of the rhymes are full, perfect rhymes as well. Generally speaking, the steady, unchanging rhyme scheme helps the poem feel like a walk. Just like a pair of feet, one rhyme is laid down after another. It's also notable how many of these end words have negative connotations. Out of sixteen ending words, perhaps only five sound neutral when taken out of context: street, flow, meet, Man, and hear. All of the rest deal with pain, the sounds of pain, or images of restriction—and in the final word of the poem ("hearse"), death itself. This helps the poem create an overall atmosphere of misery, and brings those other five words into this world of negative connotations. In context, "street" becomes the site of London's misery, and every person that the speaker "meets" is evidence of oppression and pain. The poem thus uses a relatively straightforward rhyme scheme to keep the focus on its thematic concerns—namely, the oppression and misery of urban life.
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“London” Speaker
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The poem is written from a first-person perspective, but this "I" is non-specific. Of course, the speaker has a lot in common with William Blake himself. In particular, they share a dislike and distrust of modern industrial London, observing the way that London oppresses and depresses its inhabitants.
The speaker is, like Blake, a kind of visionary. He or she deliberately delves into the heart of London, seeking to understand the city and its people. The speaker is a visionary not just in a visual sense, but in an auditory one too. It is as though the speaker can see and hear all of London's pain and impoverishment at once. The speaker also has a theory as to the source of London's misery: "the mind-forg'd manacles." To the speaker, London represents a collective failure of the human mind—a better society based on love, freedom and joy is, or perhaps only was, possible, but has been replaced by the miserable beast that is modern-day London.
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“London” Setting
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As the title of the poem suggests, the setting here is "London." Specifically, it's the London of Blake's time—so the late 18th century.
As the poem makes clear, this was a time of economic and social hardship. Rapid industrialization had completely changed the character of the city, and it was a hard place to survive. The poem emphasizes this effort for survival: the young (represented by the chimney-sweepers), men (soldiers), and women (youthful prostitutes) all have to put their bodies on their line just in order to exist from day to day. This creates the sense that London is an unforgiving and foreboding place, where threat and danger lurk at every corner.
But the poem is also set in the speaker's own particular perceptions of London. The reader is seeing, hearing, and understanding the city through the speaker's own eyes, ears, and mind. The "mind-forg'd manacles" and the "marriage hearse," for example, are the speaker's own ideas. Indeed, the links between poverty and authority represent the speaker's own theory that, in the speaker's mind, explains London's misery.
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Literary and Historical Context of “London”
Literary Context
William Blake (1757-1827) is a poet unlike any other. Often considered one of the first of the English Romantics, he also stands apart from any movement as a unique philosopher, prophet, and artist.
Blake first printed "London" in Songs of Experience (1794), the second volume of his important collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This two-part book examines what Blake called "the two contrary states of the human soul." Many of the poems in Songs of Innocence have a counterpart in Songs of Experience, a twin poem that reads the same subjects from a new perspective.
Blake conceived most of these poems not just as text, but as illuminated manuscripts in which images deepen (and sometimes complicate or contradict) the meanings of the words. Blake designed, engraved, printed, painted, and published these works himself, using a technique he called the "infernal method." In this process, he painted his poems and pictures on copper plates with a resilient ink, then burned away the excess copper in a bath of acid—the opposite of the process most engravers used. But then, Blake often did the opposite of what other people did, believing that it was his role to "reveal the infinite that was hid" by custom and falsehood.
While Blake was never widely known during his lifetime, he has become one of the most famous and beloved of poets since his death, and writers from Allen Ginsberg to Olga Tokarczuk to Philip Pullman claim him as a major influence.
Historical Context
William Blake spent much of his life railing against the cruelties of 19th-century British society. And he had plenty to rail against!
The England of Blake's time was just getting caught up in the Industrial Revolution, a period during which the economy shifted from farming to manufacturing. The countryside began to empty out, and the cities began to swell. And English class divisions, always intense, began to seem even more pronounced as impoverished workers lived cheek-by-jowl with the fashionable and wealthy in newly crowded towns.
Workers during the early Industrial Revolution got a pretty raw deal. Even young children were forced to work in factories, dig in mines, and sweep chimneys (an absurdly dangerous job, contrary to the cheery Mary Poppins image many are familiar with: chimney-sweeps as young as three or four years old regularly suffocated in narrow flues). Adults didn't have it much easier. With few regulations to keep factory owners in check, bosses could impose impossible working hours, or withhold pay for any number of trifling offenses.
Blake saw these societal changes as threats to humankind. In "London," he describes industrial society as a form of physical and mental enslavement—as "mind-forg'd manacles."
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More “London” Resources
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External Resources
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Illustration and Other Poems — A resource from the Tate organization, which holds a large collection of Blake originals. Here the poem can be seen in its original illustrated form.
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Blake's Radicalism — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's radicalism.
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Blake's Visions — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's religious visions.
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A Reading by Idis Elba — Actor Idris Elba reads "London."
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The Chimney Sweepers Article — An article from the British Library that looks at Blake's "Chimney Sweepers" poems, which relate to lines 9 and 10 of "London." The article offers insight into what the life of a "sweep" was like.
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Full Text of Songs of Innocence and Experience — Various formats for the full collection in which "L" appears.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake
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