poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

Blake moves his poem from talking about love to talking about events that are important to all human race

this poem shows a very dark and dismal side of london it also shows the historical context and tells you where the hobos live!

i think that william's poem of london is one of the best he has ever written, stressing points of moral decay, corruption, war and suffering as well as the damage of society by its own doing!

The is a great poem. I love it because it has a sexy vibe to it. I am depressed and have nothing else to so but this.

i think william blake is making a social comment about the desperation and poverty of the unfortunate people living in london at this moment in time.

it is about London the captial city which represents all that Blake repudiated in the Augustan outlook. Blake was a Londoner who lived & worked in London & he witnessed the suffering of the ordinary people there.
London was the Augustan capital in which the Augustan iniquitous were most apparent.
in the first stanza he calls the streets chartered because the streets are named after famous people or events so they have become a part of the constitution, in other words only the famous give their names to the streets.
The mind forged manacles show that Blake considered the restrictions (manacles) which bind man are forged in the Augustan mind, & when we say mind we mean all intellectual fields.
The Augustan outlook which Blake repudiated emanated from the unifrom & universal system of classical education which applied to ALL segments of the upper class.
in the third stanza the hapless soldier sighs because he is forced to fight in foreign wars in foreign lands & he doesn't know why he fights, the training is brutal & there is no pension for him to take after all his suffering so he ends up being a beggar.
The ultimate suffering for Blake in this poem is the plight of young girls who had to resort to prostitution.
the age Blake was living in is an age of death not an age of life, an age of opression where the happiness of a wedding turns into mournings in funerals & the cart that the bride & groom use to go to their wedding bed turns into a cart for dead people, because the age itself forced death upon them as if the prostitutes curses infects the marriage with plague.