Blake’s description of experience with reference to “London” :
The poet-painter, Early Romantic and visionary-spiritualist, William Blake confessed in his prophetic work “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” that “without contraries, there is no progression”- the embodiment of which tenet is his demonstration of the two contrary states of human soul in his two poem collections, “Songs of Innocence” (1789) and “Songs of Experience” (1794). “London” is a quintessential poem in the “Songs of Experience” which showcases the deplorable state of the post-Industrial Revolution London in terms of its filthy environment as well as in the diseased lifestyle of the morose Londoners. Blake’s poetic style coupled with his Romantic vigour and artistic sensibility garnishes this poem with an eternal armour to stand the test of time.
The poem is set in the Industrial London of the late eighteenth century and in the speaker wanders in the gloomy streets only to “mark” agony everywhere. This mechanized and filthy setting, full of blackening soots and factory wastes, anticipates the impending doom of destruction. In the opening stanza, the speaker roams in the “charter’d” streets near the “charter’d” Thames. This repetition of the term “charter’d” signifies the ironical contrast between human commercialisation and Nature’s mollification. What Nature authorises is sweet and comforting like the Thames river but what man authorises is polluted and dirty like the streets. Man has even chartered the Thames by calumniating it with soots and wastes. The sense of commercialisation is dominant over the sense of peace and purity. The speaker notices in every face he meets ” Marks of weakness, marks of woe”. This weakness and woe – signs of excessive hardships and authoritarian exploitation – mark both physical and spiritual wretchedness.
In the second stanza, Blake very tactfully repeats the word “every” extravagantly to impose a sense of universal loss. The speaker notices nothing but “cry” in every individual – from an infant to a grown-up man. It indicates that life in London offers peace to none and suffering here begins right from the birth. The marks of weakness and woe in the previous stanza here becomes “cry of fear”, suggesting a more intense form of agony. The cause behind this common grief, according to the speaker, is ” mind-forg’d manacles “, one of the most quoted and debated phrases of Blake. This bears a dual connotation : firstly, a mental torment distressing the soul and secondly, a self-ordinanced slavery to the hallucinating myth of ‘happy days’, as shown by the Industrial Revolution.
In the third stanza, Blake becomes more particular with specific reference to the hardships of soldiers and chimney sweepers. The little chimney sweepers risk their lives in high and filthy chimneys for a mouthful , and when unemployed, begs to fill their belly. Their owes are both due to the Industrial Revolution and to the callous government, which cares not a bit for their innocent lives. Moreover, the “House of God” also offers no salvation for these hapless lot. The “black’ning” church signifies not only the outer structure of churches besmeared with black soot but also the degeneration of humanity and compassion. Blake’s satire against Swedenborgism or “New Churches of Jerusalem” is prominent in the failure of churches to provide love and peace. The blood and sigh of the “hapless soldier” symbolizes the loss of lives and empire in American Revolution and the authoritarian oppression respectively. Londoners have lost both physical comfort and spiritual salvation due to the manipulative monarchy and the ecclesiastical order.
Blake’s poetic vigour reaches its apex in the concluding section where he describes the “midnight streets” of London and shows that even the dark night cannot disguise the despair of Londoners. His oxymoronic juxtaposition of the images of pure infant and profane prostitute leaves us in a metaphysical awe.
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear”
The night , instead of bestowing rest and peace, is harbouring curses and painful cries. Sexual and marital union should be signs of life and hope, but are tainted by the blight of venereal disease. Thus the closing image of the ‘Marriage hearse’ is one in which love and desire can produce only death and destruction. It would also tally with Blake’s belief that the institution of marriage killed free love. Blake detaches the positive value from sacred and productive ideas like marriage and copulation to make it more horrible than ever, and thereby perfects the state of Experience in this poem.
Thus, “London” offers us an appallingly destitute condition of London and Londoners – where only suffering and despair leads man to irrecoverable damnation.
