London Flashcards
(4 cards)
What is interesting about the lack of direct description of people in London?
- Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete human form—the human form that Blake has used repeatedly in the collection to personify and render natural phenomena—is lacking.
How are institutions of power referred to?
- Institutions of power—the clergy, the government—are rendered by synecdoche, by mention of the places in which they reside.
Why is it important that the people and institutions in the poem are never directly seen?
it is crucial to Blake’s commentary that neither the city’s victims nor their oppressors ever appear in body: Blake does not simply blame a set of institutions or a system of enslavement for the city’s woes; rather, the victims help to make their own “mind-forg’d manacles,” more powerful than material chains could ever be.
How does the poem culminate?
The poem climaxes at the moment when the cycle of misery recommences, in the form of a new human being starting life: a baby is born into poverty and depravity. Sexual and marital union—the place of possible regeneration and rebirth—are tainted by the blight of venereal disease. Thus Blake’s final image is the “Marriage hearse,” a vehicle in which love and desire combine with death and destruction.
