Blake's "London" Compared With Other Poetic Complainers

Most of the other poetry we have read from poets who are disillusioned or disenchanted with the British monarchy has taken a broader approach, whether it is Wordsworth trying to encourage statesmen to think more kindly on the Cumberland Beggar, or Shelly listing off well-known officials in unflattering metaphorical jibes, or Byron drawing on powerful historical examples to compare satirically to the present regime. So it is hardly uncommon to find discontent with how Britain is run in a poem of this era. In fact, it seems to be the norm, perhaps with the exception of Hemans’ seemingly more patriotically inclined work.

What is unusual is how this commentary is framed. This is perhaps the most intimate of complaints of this nature. “The Old Cumberland Beggar” seems personal and narrow, but the beggar in question clearly stands for a wider issue. The same can most likely be said of “London,” but it is doubtful that Wordsworth knew the beggar as individually as Blake knows London. Told from first-person, this poem is a gritty, close-up tour of the effects of the negligence of the authorities which are safely removed from it. Here we see the faces and hear the cries of the victims of an ill, unclean city.

Somehow there is a deeper intensity to the images woven here, than in the abstract, if macabre descriptions of mistreatment of commoners by Shelly. To hear “infants cry of fear” and “youthful Harlots curse” and to see “marks of weakness, marks of woe” in faces, we can imagine a first-person perspective stroll through these soot-stained streets, surrounded by nonstop anguish. Yet this text is not bereft of metaphor, for all its directness. But rather than distract from the grisly reality, these metaphors complement it, as there is a seamless quality to the transitions, for example, “...the hapless Soldiers sigh/Runs in blood down Palace walls.”

And while Shelly and Byron clearly had revolutionary zeal in their poems, Blake’s narrator here seems relatively accepting, if in a bitter way. As he travels through the socioeconomic mire, he seems in a sort of “appalled” awe, but he doesn’t end on an inspirational note. His observations are bleak and despairing from start to finish, probably not due to any lethargy on Blake’s part, or he wouldn’t have written the poem. But perhaps in poems which offer grand inspiration, the reader comes away from them feeling as though the moment of energy they have received from the work is enough. The hope for now is plenty satisfying. Blake, perhaps in an attempt to be more effective at inciting change, leaves it to the reader to make what they will of it, as though the situation won’t change simply by viewing it sympathetically.