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.
