William Blake's "London" is a poem in which the imagery is used by the poet to create a dark vision of the urban setting and to give hints of daily horrors taking place on the streets of the city and behind closed doors. The speaker walks through the streets of the city and observes on every face "Marks of weakness, marks of woe" (4). He notes that he is wandering through every chartered street and also refers to the river as the "charter'd Thames." He seems to be linking the degradation of human life with civilization, with a civilization that can produce a government that needs to name and "legalize" streets and the river itself. The result is a street filled with people who have the horror of their lives etched on their faces.
The first stanza presents what the speaker sees, while the second stanza presents sounds of different ages in society:
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear (5-8).
The image of manacles "heard" is reinforced by the fact that these manacles are mental creations, as if the mind of society had manacled these people so that their cries are heard by every passer-by.
Different images of others in society are offered in the third stanza, from the chimneysweep to the soldier. The image created by the poem overall is of a society in which people at all levels are crying out as if they have been trapped by the manacles created by civilization itself. Society thus does not create the better life it claims but something that takes human beings away from the natural life they once knew. This is emphasized in the last stanza as the poet notes how the cries of harlots in the street "blights with plagues the Marriage hearse" (16). In this stanza, Blake is not merely holding up harlotry as a challenge to marriage but is also criticizing marriage as itself a "hearse," since it is another social institution that has been imposed by
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