I wander through each chartered street,
[Chartered from mapped, and has a negative meaning cause prisoners are numbered]
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
[Even the River was given a name…]
And mark in every face I meet [Notice]
Marks of weakness, marks of woe [Signs]
[Woe- Misery]
In every cry of every man,
In every Infants cry of fear
[Infant is capitalized due to the importunacy of the noun]
In every voice, in every ban [prohibitions]
The mind-forged manacles I hear
[Manacles are sort of cuffs, for hands and legs but in here the cuffs are in the inhabitants’ minds]
How the Chimney-sweepers’ cry
[That’s capitalized as well. And they cry because the soot gets into their mouth and eyes.]
Every black’nin Church appalls [makes whiten. Like gone white from fright]
[Church is capitalized. The churches when black because of the soot too]
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh [Unfortunate]
[Soldier is capitalized, and they sigh because they are going to die due to many wars]
Runs in blood down the Palace walls
[There…dying and covering the Palace walls with their blood]
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse [young]
[Harlots are young prostitutes.]
[Their cries are so loud. Generally babies cry when they are born, to breath, but that means they suffer the moment they are born until they die]
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
[Blight is to bring disease. The hearse is the thing that the casket goes inside. So it is ironic. Since Marriage represents beginning while hearse represent the end. ]
The excessive use in capitalization: Is first of all because it is an old poem, and therefore every sentence starts with a Capital letter; but the other words that do not start at the beginning of a sentence are capitalized because of their Importance
Some capitalized words:
1- Street – 2 –
2- Every – 7 –
3- Mark – 3 –
4- Cry – 3 –
5- Hear – 2 –
6- Infant – 2 –
7- I – 4 –
8- Chartered – 2 –
Reason for repetition:
-Emphasis: It concentrate on certain words
-Sound: give a certain sound
-Rhyme: generally to please us because we like rhymes
Subject: People of London
Theme: - The horrors of an Industrial city in the 19th century
- The Hardship of inhabitances in the 19th century
Tone: Despair, desperate, angry, sad
Setting: In London, in the 19th century
Speaker: Someone that witnessed the horrors and felt sympathy or compassion.
Poet: William Blake
A little Description of the poem: The writer, walks around the industrial city and hates the things he sees. First he notices that things have names and numbers now and so it causes a mental blockage in his mind. Then he the cries of everyone suffering from such bans. And how little kids enter dark, tight chimneys and breath the soot it. How no matter what they try to do Soldiers will eventually still die young and how it always ends depressingly.
Style of poem: It’s probably a Victorian poem [Industrialization]. It has 4 verses and the rhyming scheme is a,b,a,b c,d,c,d, e,f,e,f, d,g,d,g,. It has a meter
Meter: A particular arrangement of words in poetry, determined by the kind and number of metrical units in a line