Comparing London by William Blake and Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

Comparing London by William Blake and Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

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

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...r for what she does in order to

make a living. This is ironic because the business of prostitution is

caused in part by the restrictions placed upon the married man. It is

also ironic because the married man is what has created the need for,

and use of prostitutes. The harlot curses the respectable and polite

society because it is they who have created the demand for her, and

then look down upon what she does. ‘Blights with plagues’ implies

that perhaps she also infects them with some sort of sexually

transmitted disease, conceivably as a type of vengeance upon those who

shun her. The final words of the poem, “Marriage hearse” compares

marriage to death. The narrator sees marriage as another type of

restriction placed upon man by society, marriage is a sort of death in

man’s ability to be free to do as he wishes.