William Blake's "London" -What is a Poem's "context"?
An attempty to understand how a poem can be viewed as an object and yet be elucidated by considering the author's works in general
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III: WILLIAM BLAKE'S "LONDON"
(Printed version, 1794)
I wander thro? each charter?d street,
Near where the charter?d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man.
In every Infants cry of fear.
In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg?d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls.
And the hapless Soldiers sign
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro? midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
The journeys and excursions described in William Blake's poetry are (or seem to be) of a quite different order from those encountered in Wordsworth's poetry. Blake's poetry does not depict natural scenes in the familiar or realistic mode. Blake's eye perceived what the poet understood as the spiritual realities that underlie the world of common experience. Following precedents set by Dante and Milton, his long poems express the author's concern for the spiritual progress of mankind from its myth-shrouded beginnings to the ultimate advent of the New Jerusalem.
William Blake and Goethe, however much they differed in many obvious respects, shared the belief that, in its ultimate manifestation mankind's "wandering" journey through history and experience meant progress in the act of striving to unite polarities and contrasts. Like Goethe, Blake conceived of inferior kinds of wandering manifested by those who only represent a partial aspect of wandering in its most comprehensive and inclusive sense.
In "The Mental Traveller" there is a reference to "cold earth wanderers", whom the speaker disparagingly contrasts with "the mental traveller" as one who is free to move through time and space without encumbrances, even in reverse sequence. This reference seems to constitute an allusion to the depictions of travel and movement found in "The Lyrical Ballads" by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
However, is the cleft between Blake's depictions of a traveller's experience and those of the Lakers' so fundamental as it might first appear? Or did both Blake and Wordsworth seek to illuminate the same fundamental relationship, though their approaches to it were from quite opposite directions, revealing the difference of stance between poets who represent travelling realistically and those who choose to represent "dreamlike journeys"? In both kinds of journey, the realistic and more obviously symbolic or mythical modes of representation merge, making an absolute division between them appear questionable.
As "wandering" was for Goethe and the Romantics a synonym for poetry and the poetical imagination , we will be in a stronger position to assess similarities and differences between Blake and Wordsworth as poets if we compare two celebrated poems introduced by a declined form of the verb "to wander".
Blake's visions do not reveal any escapist refusal to confront the realities of the world, but rather manifest an acute awareness of social and political conditions. To make a comparison, Dante's The Divine Comedy is as much concerned with his contemporary society as it is with realities beyond temporal reality.
"London" belongs to the Songs of Experience, and within a yet broader context, to The Songs of Innocence and Experience. A comparison between the draft version of 1792 1 and the printed version of 1794 reveals significant alterations giving pointers to the poem's deep levels of significance.
In the printed version "chartered street" and "chartered Thames" replaced "dirty street" and "dirty Thames". Perhaps the motive of pollution that runs through the poem did not need any reinforcement by the repetition of "dirty". The choice of "chartered" for the printed version reflects a fundamental shift in attitude towards the nature of freedom. Before the Romantic period freedom was understood as a system of privileges graciously bestowed on subjects by a monarch or member of the nobility. The formulation "German forged" in the draft version poses an unfriendly allusion to George III and the Hanoverian dynasty. The substitution of "see" by "mark" in the printed version, effects what J. Tynjanov referred to as "lexical coloration". The reader becomes conscious of the potential universal implication of the word "mark" over and above its specific meaning in any particular context. The word "wintry", substituted by "midnight" in the printed version intimates the negative aspects of wandering with sin and disorientation. The reference to winter gives occasion for a consideration of the "mythical" or season-oriented aspects of "wandering", winter being a universal symbol of death and frozen mental conditions. Reasons for considering wandering within a mythical and seasonal frame pose the subject matter of discussion in a following section of this study.
While "I wandered" in Wordsworth's poem is set in the past tense, implying a division between past and present, London begins with the verb set in the present tense. This implies that the poem concerns timeless realities unbounded by references to any particular incident.
Blake's "London", far from expressing the feelings of elevation and joy that characterise "I Wandered lonely as a cloud", presents a dismal picture of London as a symbol of fallen humanity. The poem reveals the most negative sense of "to wander", that namely that associated with the Fall and its consequence, for it focuses attention on Man's almost total loss of moral freedom and on acts of violence typified by the murder committed by Cain. Particular irony attaches to the fact that the "free" city of London that had enjoyed the privileges and "liberties" vested in its charter should symbolise such mental and spiritual bondage.
As a born Londoner, Blake had every opportunity of roaming through the streets of London, yet it is doubtful that he should ever have experienced an occasion when every face he saw betrayed "marks of woe". The concept of universality, here the universal condition of fallen Man, informs the poet's vision. It is not here a question of the speaker inferring a general truth from the appearance of particulars but of a general truth, or what is perceived as such, revealing itself in a highly select aggregation of appropriate images.
Images indicating pollution are strikingly frequent, particularly in the working draft of the poem in which "dirty" held the place of "chartered". An association of physical pollution, in the form of soot and the shedding of blood, with moral corruption in high places, in "church" and "palace", is effected by the imagery of the third stanza. The choice of the word "blights" in the fourth strophe reinforces the poem's theme of pollution with the implication that venereal diseases wreak vengeance on the respectable who indulge in what they outwardly condemn. The threefold repetition of "mark(s)" in the first strophe (in the draft "And see" stands in the place of "And mark." in the printed version) is not only consistent with the combined motifs of pollution and lost freedom but also introduces a biblical note into the poem through the word's evocation of the mark of Cain in Genesis and the mark of the Beast in the Book of Revelation. The vision of the poem then comprehends the history of mankind from its origins until the end of its unregenerate condition in the last days. Cain was not an eternal nomad but the founder of city civilisation according to the Bible. The appearance of the youthful harlot in the final strophe implies that London and the Babylon of the Apocalypse are one.
Is the vision informing the poem then one of unmitigated despair offering no glimpse of Babylon's divine counterpart, Jerusalem? "To wander" bears, even in this poem, implications which are not entirely negative. The speaker is a witness. He refers to himself only when stating "I see", "I mark", "I hear" and "I meet". He perceives people but does not interact with them. The identity of the speaker is inferable only from the manner and scope of his perception, which is searching penetrating and ubiquitous. The Wanderer might be described as a kind of divinely appointed secret agent like Bandelaire's flaneur. The words "I mark" may be taken to mean "I record" as well as "I notice": The mystic eye scans London and witnesses its iniquities. The poem contains hints that judgement will be visited on London not as a result of a purely external event but of what is already stirring in London itself. The speaker hears or sees representatives of professions which do society's ?dirty work? in various ways, whether chimney sweeping, soldiery and prostitution. Though the point is not so clearly made as in Auguries of Innocence, the victims of oppression will prove the instruments of their oppressors' undoing. The chimney-sweeper's cry reproaches the Church for its blindness to social injustice, the hapless soldier's sigh threatens violence to the Palace where war plans are forged. The poem's reference to"the youthful harlot's curse" alludes to the often involuntary inveigling of young girls into prostitution, an institution which Blake believed was the inevitable consequence of marriages enforced by law.
"London" belongs to a cycle of poems, and in so doing cannot be treated as a totally enclosed or self-sufficient work.. It allows itself to be elucidated through comparisons with other poems, in the first place those sharing the general title Songs of Innocence and Experience. From this basis we can proceed relatively smoothly to considering the yet wider circle that encompasses Blake's works in general. The procedure of progressively widening the contextual vista centred in a specific poem or poetic passage will be applied several times in the course of subsequent discussions, a procedure which accords with linguistic theories that assert that "the word" marks the intersection-point at which different levels of this word's significance meet and interact. While no discovery of external facts about the author and his or her times can objectively add to, or detract from, the text, it may alter our perception of what is in the text, often by corroborating what a reader intuits when reading it. I have suggested in the case of "London" that the poet's vision offers an element of hope. If we consider the poem in the context of the collection of poems to which it belongs -The Songs of Innocence and Experience - we may infer that it does not reveal Blake's all-embracing conception of London but only a conception of its most negative aspects. A different picture of London is shown by "Holy Thursday", a poem telling of alms-giving to the poor children of London. Innocence and experience are two contraries, which in Blake's view together form the prerequisite for moral progress. We may see the work in a wider context still, namely as an anticipation of Blake's future works including Milton and Jerusalem. In these the association of words or symbols signalled by the words "harlot", "Babylon" and forms of the word "to wander" become explicit, while in "London" they are but inferable.
.& and thou 0 Virgin Babylon, Mother of Whoredoms, Shalt bring Jerusalem in thine arms in the night watches; and No longer burning her a wandering Harlot in the streets Shalt give her into the arms of God your Lord & Husband.
Milton Plate 3320-23
ANNOTATIONS
1. Working Draft of ?London? (ca. 1792): underlined words are delete, replacing words are in Italics:
I Wander thro each dirty street / Near where the dirty Thames does flow/ And see mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness marks of woe END OF STROPHE In every cry of every man/ In every voice of every child every infants cry of fear/ In every voice in in every ban/ The german mind forgd links I hear manacles I hear END OF STROPHE
But most How the chimney sweepers cry / Blackens oer the churches Every blackening church appalls / And the hapless soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls. END OF STROPHE But most the midnight harlots curse/ From every dismal street I hear/ Weaves around the marriage hearse / And blasts the new born infants tear. END OF STROPHE AND THEN RECASTING OF FINAL LINES: But most from every thro wintry streets I hear / How the midnight harlots curse/ And blasts the new born infants tear NEW LINE And hangs smites the marriage hearse NL But most the shreaks of youth I hear NL But most thro midnight &c
