How do I analyse London by William Blake for GCSE?

What is Blake's London about?

The speaker wanders "thro' each charter'd street" of London, near the "charter'd Thames". In every face he sees "Marks of weakness, marks of woe", signs of exhaustion and sorrow. In the second stanza he hears the same misery everywhere: in men, in frightened babies, in every voice and every "ban", a word that can mean a curse or an official rule forbidding something. Behind it all he hears "mind-forg'd manacles", chains made of ideas rather than iron.

The third stanza shows two victims. A chimney sweep's cry shames the Church, and a soldier's sigh "Runs in blood down Palace walls". The last stanza is the darkest. At midnight the speaker hears a young prostitute's curse, which harms her newborn baby and turns marriage itself into a funeral: "the Marriage hearse". A hearse is the carriage that carries a coffin. Many readers take this as disease spreading from the young woman to the men who pay her, and on to their wives and children.

What is the context of Blake's London?

William Blake (1757 to 1827) was born in London and lived there for most of his life. He was a painter and engraver as well as a poet, and he printed and coloured his books by hand. London appeared in 1794 in Songs of Experience. That book pairs with an earlier one, Songs of Innocence (1789), and Blake sold the two together, describing them as showing two opposite states of the human soul.

The 1790s were a risky time to criticise authority. The French Revolution began in 1789, and Blake sympathised with its early hopes of freedom. Britain went to war with revolutionary France in 1793, and the government cracked down on people it saw as radicals. In 1804 Blake himself was tried for sedition, the crime of stirring up rebellion against the king. He was found not guilty.

The suffering in the poem was real. Very young children were made to climb inside chimneys to clean them, and Blake wrote a poem called "The Chimney Sweeper" for both Songs books. His notebook shows a first draft of London in which the streets and the river were simply "dirty". He changed the word to "charter'd". A charter is a legal document that grants rights or ownership, often to merchants and companies. The change moves the blame from dirt to power: the streets, and even the river, belong to someone.

How does Blake present power in London?

Power in London is almost invisible, but its effects are everywhere. The word "charter'd" is used twice in two lines, for the streets and then for the Thames. If even a river can be owned, nothing in the city is free. The word "mark" works the same way. The speaker notices, or marks, every face he meets, and every face carries "Marks", like scars or bruises. The city leaves its stamp on people.

The second stanza hammers one word: "every". It opens "In every cry of every Man", and the next two lines also begin "In every". This is anaphora, the repetition of words at the start of lines, and the effect is relentless. Nobody escapes, from grown men to babies. The stanza ends on the poem's most famous image, "The mind-forg'd manacles I hear". Manacles are handcuffs or chains, and "forg'd" suggests a blacksmith hammering metal. Here, though, the chains are made in the mind. People are held down by fear, and by accepting that nothing can change.

In the third stanza Blake names the powerful. The Church is described as blackening, darkened by soot and perhaps by shame. The child sweep's cry appals it, meaning horrifies it, yet the Church does nothing to help. The soldier's "sigh" becomes blood running down "Palace walls", so the monarchy is shown with blood on its hands. Blake does not need to say the king is to blame. The image says it for him.

The final image is an oxymoron, two opposite ideas joined together: "the Marriage hearse". A wedding should be a beginning; a hearse carries the dead. By ending here, Blake suggests that the city's sickness reaches every stage of life, from birth to marriage to death.

What do the form and structure of Blake's London add?

London has four quatrains, stanzas of four lines each, and every stanza rhymes ABAB. The lines are short, mostly with four strong beats, like a steady walking pace. This tight, regular pattern suits a city where everything is controlled. The rhythm keeps marching on, and so does the misery.

Blake called these poems songs, and the simple rhyme sounds almost like a nursery rhyme. That makes the content more shocking. A form linked with childhood carries images of children crying and being harmed.

The poem is in the first person and the present tense ("I wander", "I hear"), so it reads like an eyewitness report. Notice how it moves from sight to sound. In the first stanza the speaker sees the marks on people's faces. From then on he hears: cries, sighs and curses. The sounds follow him even when he cannot see their cause.

Punctuation shapes the pace. The comma in "Marks of weakness, marks of woe" is a caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, which splits it into two matching halves like a slow drumbeat. Elsewhere Blake uses enjambment, where a sentence runs on over the end of a line. The soldier's sigh starts on one line and "Runs in blood down Palace walls" on the next, so the sentence itself seems to run downwards. The last stanza opens with "But most", which tells us the worst has been saved for the end.

Which poems does Blake's London compare well with?

Pick a partner poem that lets you say something different, not just something similar. These three work well.

What could an exam question on Blake's London ask?

On AQA, Paper 2 Section B prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster. You compare it with one other poem from the cluster, which you choose and quote from memory. The question is worth 30 marks and is assessed on AO1, AO2 and AO3, the assessment objectives. There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Two focuses to practise, written for this guide:

Focus 1: Compare how poets present the effects of power on ordinary people in London and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Focus 2: Compare how poets present suffering in London and in one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing London with Ozymandias:

Blake and Shelley both attack the powerful, but Blake shows the damage while it is still happening. In London, the "mind-forg'd manacles" suggest that ordinary people are trapped by ideas as well as poverty, and the soldier's sigh that "Runs in blood down Palace walls" puts the blame on the monarchy. Shelley's tyrant, by contrast, has already fallen: "Nothing beside remains." Writing in the 1790s, when criticising the king was dangerous, Blake offers no such comfort. The misery he describes is in the present tense.

The final short sentence does real work: it turns a point about grammar (the present tense) into a point about meaning.

Key quotations from Blake's London to learn

These six cover the poem from its first line to its last.

• "I wander thro' each charter'd street": "wander" sounds free, but "charter'd" shows that even the streets are owned.
• "Marks of weakness, marks of woe": the repeated "marks" and heavy "w" sounds show damage written on every face.
• "The mind-forg'd manacles I hear": chains made of ideas rather than iron, holding people down from the inside.
• "Runs in blood down Palace walls": the soldier's suffering stains the monarchy that sent him to fight.
• "the youthful Harlot's curse": a young woman forced into prostitution, whose curse spreads the city's sickness.
• "the Marriage hearse": an oxymoron that joins the start of a family to a funeral.