William Blake London Analysis Essay

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An analysis on William Blake’s London In 1789, one of the most memorable parts of history happened—the French revolution. Many English radical thinkers like London’s, William Blake, perceived this as another chance to start anew; a fresh beginning for everyone, an end to the tyranny and authoritarianism in London. Much like in every nation, there are those that are tied to the old ways and belief systems. That being said, some of the conservative thinkers of this time dismissed the whole revolution as abhorrent or affront to the European way of civilization. This revolution can be thought of as an eruption and when it went off, everything inside came exploding into the air. When the French revolution began, more radical thinkers came out …show more content…

Carefully noticing his choice of words would give a deeper understanding of the poem. His use of the word charter’d to describe River Thames, which pertains to a document issued by the government that gives rights to a person or group, means that everything was by the government’s ruling. The last two lines of the first stanza, ”And mark in every face I meet /Marks of weakness, marks of woe” show that however the conservatives want to consider the revolution an insult to the European civilization, the faces of the people he saw in the city show loneliness and weakness because the city was crumbling to ashes and its people were left to suffer the consequences of a bad governance who’s had the people believe they could not do anything. In the second stanza, he mentions the mind-forg'd manacles, which denotes that the kind of thinking of the people around this time was trapped in the prison they made themselves because they have accepted the way things are for themselves with no attempt to change the repression to their rights. The people in his poem were not actually present, but an indirect meeting with them was demonstrated through the traces they may have left, like the blood and the cries that haunt the city, which was a literary symbolism: not one of them appears in