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 black'ning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
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
Summary
The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his
observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears
fear and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper
stands as a chastisement to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the
outer walls of the monarch's residence. The nighttime holds nothing more
promising: the cursing of prostitutes corrupts the newborn infant and sullies
the "Marriage hearse."
Form
The poem has four quatrains, with alternate lines rhyming. Repetition is
the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the
prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.
Commentary
The opening image of wandering, the focus on sound, and the images of stains in
this poem's first lines recall the Introduction to Songs of Innocence,
but with a twist; we are now quite far from the piping, pastoral bard of the
earlier poem: we are in the city. The poem's title denotes a specific
geographic space, not the archetypal locales in which many of the other
Songs are set. Everything in this urban space--even the natural River
Thames--submits to being "charter'd," a term which combines mapping and
legalism. Blake's repetition of this word (which he then tops with
two repetitions of "mark" in the next two lines) reinforces the sense of
stricture the speaker feels upon entering the city. It is as if language
itself, the poet's medium, experiences a hemming-in, a restriction of resources.
Blake's repetition, thudding and oppressive, reflects the suffocating atmosphere
of the city. But words also undergo transformation within this repetition: thus
"mark," between the third and fourth lines, changes from a verb to a pair of
nouns--from an act of observation which leaves some room for imaginative
elaboration, to an indelible imprint, branding the people's bodies regardless of
the speaker's actions.
Ironically, the speaker's "meeting" with these marks represents the experience
closest to a human encounter that the poem will offer the speaker. All the
speaker's subjects--men, infants, chimney-sweeper, soldier, harlot--are
known only through the traces they leave behind: the ubiquitous cries, the blood
on the palace walls. Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete human
form--the human form that Blake has used repeatedly in the Songs to
personify and render natural phenomena--is lacking. In the third stanza the cry
of the chimney-sweep and the sigh of the soldier metamorphose (almost
mystically) into soot on church walls and blood on palace walls--but we never
see the chimney-sweep or the soldier themselves. Likewise, institutions of
power--the clergy, the government--are rendered by synecdoche, by mention of the
places in which they reside. Indeed, 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.
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,
to a cursing, prostitute mother. 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.
