Comparison of Poems about London by William Wordsworth and William Blake
William Blake’s ‘London’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ are very different in both content and in style.
Wordsworth’s romantic, beautiful and optimistic description of London is very different to Blake’s highly critical and pessimistic writing about London.
Blake’s poem is not as much about London itself than about the people living in it. Wordsworth’s sonnet, on the other hand, is not about the people, but is about the city. Blake’s poem is very negative, using very pessimistic language such as ‘woe’, ‘manacles’, ‘black’ning’ and ‘plague’. Blake writes about the people worst affected by London living, poor people. He is therefore looking only at the worst affected of people, a very pessimistic angle. He mentions Chimneysweep, Soldier and Harlot. Blake tries to describe London as a place where everyone is constrained, almost imprisoned. He writes of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’, meaning that people’s minds are imprisoned by London life. To create a negative atmosphere, Blake repeatedly uses the words ‘cry’, showing fear and ‘every’, showing consistency of the negative things he writes about. In saying, ‘every black’ning church appals’ Blake means that the dirt of it ruins any beauty London might have and that the church, as an institution, is not doing much, if anything, to help with problems like poverty and prostitution. He also accuses the monarchy of doing little to help in the second half of the third paragraph, ‘runs in blood down palace walls’. He describes, later in the poem, that the perfect symbol of innocence, a newborn child, is sucked up into the corruption and has its innocence shattered; ‘the youthful Harlot’s curse blasts the new born infant’s tear’. His last comment ‘blights with plagues the marriage curse’ could be a realisation by Blake of sexually transmitted diseases, which are spread through things like prostitution and could make marriage lead to death.
