He uses a list of things to describe the morning and how beautiful it is. ‘The beauty of the morning: silent, bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lay…valley, rock, or hill’. Here, he uses man-made and natural things.
Throughout the poem he uses personification to compare London with a person of royalty with such beautiful buildings, fields, ‘smokeless air’ and a sun with beautiful colours.
London:-
Unlike Wordsworth, William Blake lived and experienced the whole London life; this means he was able to write about the reality of the city. He describes it as being very rough and harsh for the working class and how no one, not event the church, would help them. Again, he uses different techniques to help the reader picture themselves walking through the dull streets of London.
In the first stanza, he says how every street is planned; the River Thames has to flow in a certain direction because of the banks blocking it and how the people look weak and unhappy.
He uses long vowel sounds ‘I wander thro’ each charter’d street’ and punctuation to create the pace that the poem should be read at. This also gives a pace of how fast or slow he is walking. He also uses repetition in the first two lines ‘charter’d’ and alliteration ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’ to make it more effective and to describe how it was and how people were.
In the second stanza he uses the word ‘every’ repeatedly, this could emphasise a funeral march – the beat is slow and heavy ‘In every cry of every Man’. Blake uses a lot of hearing sensitivity which makes the image a lot clearer as you can actually hear the people around you as you walk through the street ‘In every Infant’s cry of fear,…The mind-forg’d manacles I hear’ – it is as if you can hear people suffering.
The fourth stanza tends to be more graphic as it starts off expressing ‘the chimney-sweeper’s cry’ which are young working class boy’s cleaning chimneys. It then goes on to say how every church is shocked ‘every black’ning Church appalls’, but it doesn’t even do anything to help the poor like it should be. There is also a half pun on the word ‘appalls’ – you can hear it as St.Paul’s. It then leads on to working class going to war and coming home badly injured and no one tries to help them, not even the rich (i.e. royalty), so they are just left to die ‘the hapless Soldier’s sigh runs in blood down palace walls’.
In the last stanza, it again uses sound sensitivity of how during midnight you can hear a young prostitute’s baby cry which is said to be a ‘curse’ and also is a symbol of working class women ‘the youthful Harlot’s curse blasts the new born infant’s tear’. The last line basically explains that if no one helps- you might as well die because there is no future.
