One of Willam Blake’s greatest poems, London, clearly shows the nature of Blake’s art and the nature of his relationship with his time. His insights are not primarily empirical, nor do they describe accurately the individual facts or situations. Blake tries to unveil the condition of man in his age through the unexpected linking of apparently disconnected perceptions.
Even the most immediate cry of indignation on seeing and hearing while walking in contemporary London, is a complex intellectual experience. London is a poem about the city in the 1790s and the image which is being drawn is barren and rotten, an image of disease and violence. Signs of misery and weakness can be discerned on everyone’s face. Every man’s voice – even the cry of every infant, a child who has not even learnt to talk yet – conveys this sense of oppression. It is as if everyone is being kept in slavery, but the manacles they wear are not literal, but mental, ‘mind-forg’d’ ones. Somehow, they are even more powerful, since they mean the oppressed are unlikely ever to rise up and challenge that which tyrannizes over them.
Even the political and the religious power – the Church and the Palace – have been invaded by the corrupt and shocking realities of Blake’s London, a world in which industrialization leads to small children being exploited and maltreated through their employment as chimney-sweepers, and in which ‘hapless’ soldiers sent off to fight, spill their blood for uncaring kings.
Blake’s claustrophobic description of the city ends with the most pervasive and frequently heard sound on London streets: the sound of a young mother – who is also a prostitute – cursing her newborn infant’s crying ‘And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse’. The final image – the oxymoron of the ‘Marriage hearse’ (hearses are for funerals, not for weddings) – appears to mean that the young unmarried mother’s unwanted child, and the misery of both mother and infant alike, is the final nail in the coffin of the idea of marriage as a sacred union. That final image symbolizes on one hand the state of society as corrupt to the very bones and, on the other, it clearly outlines how the disease, generated among the very poor who were compelled to prostitution, can become a revenge and a ‘blight’ for the whole social body.
But London also reveals a positive soul: only a decade later, in 1802, William Wordsworth declares that he had written the sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, while he was on his way from London to France. He had been struck by the beautiful sight of London at dawn, as he was crossing Westminster Bridge.
The sonnet expresses a deep emotion at the sight of an industrial city asleep in the early morning sun. The occasion of the poem seems surprising for a poet who expressed in so many poems his love for nature and his distaste for the noisy and gloomy industrial cities. The explanation has to be found in the particular moment of the day which seems to bathe London in the same clear and “smokeless” air as the natural landscape, and which creates a continuity between the city and the countryside around, “open onto the fields and to the sky”. It is possible for the poet to associate its towers, ships and domes with valley, rock and hill, thus creating an osmosis of the opposites, making them be part of the same natural world.
London, briefly and under specific conditions, can become more moving than any valley, rock, or hill. But the praise is not really for commerce or architecture in themselves; it is for a rare moment when the city appears washed clean of its usual noise and self-importance. The speaker frames the experience as a moral test as much as an aesthetic one: anyone who could pass by such a sight must be “dull of soul”. Beauty here is not optional decoration; it is evidence that the world can still pierce us, if we are awake enough to notice. Wordsworth is praising a transformation that might be temporary and even a little deceptive, as if London is briefly allowed to look innocent. At the same time, the garment metaphor gives the city a human scale, as if it has a body capable of being clothed. That prepares for the later image of the city as a living creature with a mighty heart.
The poem keeps shifting London between object and organism, between something to look at and something that, in its own way, lives. London is momentarily not sealed off from nature but exposed to it. The beauty of the city depends on a kind of suspension of its usual emissions and pressures. London becomes sublime when it stops acting like London. Wordsworth’s city is made beautiful by behaving like a landscape: bright under sun, open to sky, breathed over by clean air, traversed by a freely moving river. The poet’s admiration depends on the city’s alignment with natural rhythms rather than its usual human ones. The scene is majestic precisely because ordinary human activity has been erased. London’s greatness is typically expressed through motion – trade, conversation, conflict, ambition. Wordsworth finds it most beautiful when its heart stops.
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The materials are drawn from LitHUB. Literary echoes and future visions.
