A comparison between Blake's 'London' and Wordsworth's'Westminster Bridge'

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Alexander Phillips                

A comparison between Blake’s ‘London’ and Wordsworth’s

‘Westminster Bridge’

William Blake was born in London in 1757. He was taught by his mother at home, and became an apprentice to an engraver at fourteen. In addition to poetry Blake spent much of his time painting. Blake lived on the edge of poverty and died in neglect. His poetry receiving little acclaim while he was alive.

‘London’ was written by Blake in 1789. Taken from Blake’s ‘Songs of Experience’, the style is darker and in a sense depressing.  It describes the city after the Industrial Revolution. Blake takes a very negative and hopeless view of the city and the lives of those living within it. He hated the way London was becoming, looking negatively on business and materialism.

Blake felt himself as free, and the poem is a comment on others living in London. In the first line of the first stanza, he creates immediate effect as he contrasts the words ‘wander’ with ‘charter’d’, which he goes on to use to describe the Thames River in the following line. Wander suggests a sense of naturally meandering in an open expanse, contrasting greatly with the latter, which referring to the city itself, suggests a sense of narrow enclosed in space. This description leads the reader to envisage a regulated and constrained city, limited by business and materialism. Blake goes on to describe the ‘charter’d Thames does flow.’ This is ironic in the sense that any flow seems to be restricted by the banked in and concreted image of the river that the poet creates – there is nothing natural or beautiful about the Thames any longer. Equally Blake’s repetition of the word mark, while using it for different meaning brings emphasis and effect. He goes on to present the Londoners as unhappy victims of the industrialised ‘prison’ they are surrounded by.  

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In the second stanza Blake describes the whole scale of humanity from infant to man to feel general disgruntlement with the life that London inflicts upon them. ‘Ban’ suggests restricted or prohibited. Blake however suggests that men have in a sense designed their own prison, implying this by use of ‘mind-forg’d manacle’. He describes infants who cannot speak but are nonetheless born under the chains, which Blake suggests society has needlessly inflicted upon itself. Again he creates effect by the repetition of ‘every’.

Blake goes on in the third stanza to comment ok the use of child labour ...

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