The poem of London written by William Blake caught my attention when the vivid visual images appeared in front my eyes while I read it. The poem expresses a gritty life in the capital city of Britain. Although the poem is short in length, but the symbolisms within the lines are painting vivid images of how the speaker sees the city of London.
From the view of the speaker, we see what he sees of London, where deaths are everywhere, where everything diffuses a scent of despair, where we can see diseases rage the city. Even the city is safe from external forces like wars, but people in the city still suffer from limitation of their own nature. While reading it, I feel the sadness of the gloomy and morbid tone in this poem. The city is morally …show more content…
These lines correspond to the theme differently. The word “black’ning” in first line here mentions that the church is also involved with the enslavement. And to relate this back with the children’s cries, we know the church is also a complicit in enslave of children. The soldier’s sigh relates to the images of death mentioned earlier in words like “plagues” and “cries”, we can also see the narrator is trying to tell us the government should be responsible for all these despairs. The image is dark and dreary. The church obeys its traditional principles while soldiers die for the country they despair for. Later in this stanza, Blake introduces the palace walls into the poem. Inside the wall, there are the royals and the nobles, while outside the walls, there are hapless soldiers. They have been forced to fight for the country, but for exchange, they have nothing but …show more content…
He depicts the decay of young people in prostitution as a curse of Harlot. Then he mentions the destruction of marriage in the final sentence, where marriage and hearse both show up, one word that is joyful and represents happiness while the other means death and ending of life, hence the two discordant words are suggesting the death of marriage. And when we combine the context, we can discover Blake is relating the young prostitutes with families, the moral decay is metaphorically described as plague and disease, spread widely in the city to the people, to destroy their marriage and family, to degrade human moral. This stanza also means a vicious life cycle, where the mother is a prostitute and curses her newborn baby to have the same poor life as her, and creates more tragedy. The curse of Harlot overshadows the baby. It not only represents the death of marriage, but also the end of
From the view of the speaker, we see what he sees of London, where deaths are everywhere, where everything diffuses a scent of despair, where we can see diseases rage the city. Even the city is safe from external forces like wars, but people in the city still suffer from limitation of their own nature. While reading it, I feel the sadness of the gloomy and morbid tone in this poem. The city is morally …show more content…
These lines correspond to the theme differently. The word “black’ning” in first line here mentions that the church is also involved with the enslavement. And to relate this back with the children’s cries, we know the church is also a complicit in enslave of children. The soldier’s sigh relates to the images of death mentioned earlier in words like “plagues” and “cries”, we can also see the narrator is trying to tell us the government should be responsible for all these despairs. The image is dark and dreary. The church obeys its traditional principles while soldiers die for the country they despair for. Later in this stanza, Blake introduces the palace walls into the poem. Inside the wall, there are the royals and the nobles, while outside the walls, there are hapless soldiers. They have been forced to fight for the country, but for exchange, they have nothing but …show more content…
He depicts the decay of young people in prostitution as a curse of Harlot. Then he mentions the destruction of marriage in the final sentence, where marriage and hearse both show up, one word that is joyful and represents happiness while the other means death and ending of life, hence the two discordant words are suggesting the death of marriage. And when we combine the context, we can discover Blake is relating the young prostitutes with families, the moral decay is metaphorically described as plague and disease, spread widely in the city to the people, to destroy their marriage and family, to degrade human moral. This stanza also means a vicious life cycle, where the mother is a prostitute and curses her newborn baby to have the same poor life as her, and creates more tragedy. The curse of Harlot overshadows the baby. It not only represents the death of marriage, but also the end of