Analysis of Blakes London :: Blakes London Essays

Analysis of Blakes capital of the United Kingdom     In the formal approach method to critical analysis, it is essential to read William Blakes London mechanically. Blake uses his rhetorical skills of alliteration, imagery, and word choice to create his poem, but more importantly to express the emotional significance that is implied.   William Blakes poem, London, is obviously a sorrowful poem. In the first two stanzas, Blake utilizes alliteration and word choice to set the mournful atmosphere. Blake introduces his reader to the narrator as he wanders through the chartered fiat. A society in which every person he sees has marks of weakness, marks of woe. Blake repeatedly uses the word every and cry in the second stanza to symbolize the depression that hoers over the entire society. The mind-forged manacles the narrator hears suggests that he is not mentally stable.   In the third stanza, Blake utilizes imagery of destruction and religion. This imagery is a para dox, which implies some religious destruction similar the apocalypse. The chimney-sweepers cry symbolizes the society trying to clean the ashes that causes their state of depression. Blake uses the religious imagery of the blackning church to represent the loss of innocence, and the societys abandonment of religion. The use of the soldiers creates an imagery of war. The hapless soldiers take a breath symbolize how men are drafted into war and have no choice but to serve their country. As these soldiers unwilling march to the beat of the countrys forceful drum, they issue their lives will be taken, as their sigh runs in blood down palace walls. Blake uses this sense of destruction to explain how people are forced to overcompensate the weakness and woe of their society.   The fourth stanza of London unravels the complex meaning of the poem. The youthful harlots curse symbolizes how the youths sinful deeds will effect the next generation. Their curse causes the neonate infant s tear which exemplifies how the new generation will have to correct the mistakes of the previous generation.