“London” Summary
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.
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.
