London
A walk through chartered London in sixteen lines, where every face carries a mark of sorrow and every cry the speaker hears points back at Church, Palace or marriage.
London the full poem, lines numbered
Blake engraved these sixteen lines for Songs of Experience in 1794, printing words and picture from the same copper plate. The walk they describe would take a few minutes: chartered streets, a river, a handful of sounds, no story and no cure. One word, charter’d, turns a public street and a public river into licensed property in the first two lines. The last phrase welds a wedding to a funeral and stops.
The speaker walks through London’s streets, all of them chartered, near a Thames that is chartered too, and marks in every face he meets signs of weakness and of sorrow. In every man’s cry, in every frightened infant’s cry, in every voice and every ban, he hears chains that the mind has made. The chimney-sweeper’s cry appalls a blackening church. The unlucky soldier’s sigh runs like blood down the walls of a palace. Most of all, walking through midnight streets, he hears a young prostitute’s curse, which blasts a newborn infant’s tear and blights the marriage hearse with plagues. Nothing happens in the poem. Nobody is named, no district is given, no remedy is proposed. The movement is from what the speaker sees in the first stanza to what he hears in the other three, and from single sufferers to the institutions standing behind them.
Speaker & situation
The speaker
The walker
Unnamed, and known only by what he does: he wanders, marks, and hears (lines 1, 3, 8 and 13). He never intervenes and never says what should be done.
The Chimney-sweeper
Child worker
Present only as a cry that appalls a blackening church (lines 9 to 10). Blake gave the climbing boys a poem of their own in each book, the Innocence “Chimney Sweeper” of 1789 and a second one in Songs of Experience; here a single line is all the room they get.
The hapless Soldier
Common soldier
“Hapless” means unlucky. His sigh runs in blood down palace walls (lines 11 to 12), so the poem sends the cost of his service back to the people who ordered it.
The youthful Harlot
Young prostitute
Heard, not seen, in the midnight streets of lines 13 to 14. Her curse is the loudest thing in the poem, and readers disagree about whether the word means her cursing, her infection, or her condition.
The new born Infant
Newborn child
The last victim in the poem (line 15), whose tear is blasted before it falls. The lines do not settle whether the child is the harlot’s or the one born inside the marriage.
Form & sound
Line by line what each part says and does
- 1
Lines 1–4
The chartered walk
The speaker wanders through streets that are chartered, beside a Thames that is chartered too. In every face he meets he marks signs of weakness and of sorrow. The word “mark” is used three times in two lines, once as a verb and twice as a noun.
How it worksThe stanza sets the poem’s method: a walker, a repeated word, and a general claim about every face rather than one person’s story. Putting “charter’d” on a street and then on a river is the first shock, since a river is the last thing a city can be said to own.
- 2
Lines 5–8
Every cry, and the chains behind it
The speaker lists what he hears: every man’s cry, every infant’s cry of fear, every voice, every ban. A “ban” is a public proclamation or a curse, and the ear also catches the marriage banns that return in the last line. The stanza ends by naming what all those sounds have in common, the mind-forg’d manacles.
How it worksFive uses of “every” in four lines turn separate sufferings into one condition. The last line supplies a cause, and it locates the cause in the mind rather than in a law book, which is why readers still argue about whose mind is meant.
- 3
Lines 9–12
The Church and the Palace
The chimney-sweeper’s cry appalls every blackening church. The hapless soldier’s sigh runs in blood down palace walls. Both lines link a small person’s sound to a large building.
How it worksThis is where the poem names institutions. “Black’ning” in line 10 can be read as the church being blackened, by soot and by what it tolerates, or as the church doing the blackening, and the line supports both. The image in line 12 turns a sigh into blood on a wall, so the cost of a soldier’s death is printed on the building that sent him.
- 4
Lines 13–16
Midnight, and the marriage hearse
Walking at midnight, the speaker says that what he hears most is a young prostitute’s curse. It blasts a newborn infant’s tear and blights the marriage hearse with plagues. The poem ends there.
How it worksThe stanza moves from the public daylight of church and palace to the private contract of marriage, and it ends on a phrase that puts a wedding and a funeral in the same carriage. Blake offers no gloss, which is why the last line is the poem’s most argued-over.
The turn
Lines 13
The turn is the phrase “But most” at the start of line 13. Everything before it is a survey: every street, every face, every cry, then the sweeper and the soldier. “But most” ranks that survey and says the worst is still coming, and the setting drops from daytime streets to midnight ones. A smaller movement happens earlier, at line 9, where the poem stops generalising about “every” sufferer and starts naming particular figures and the buildings behind them.
Literary devices with line numbers
Repetition of a single word
“Charter’d” appears twice inside the first two lines, on “street” and then on “Thames.” The repetition is what does the work: said once it is a fact about a road, said twice it becomes a rule covering the whole city, and applying it to a river makes flowing water sound like a licensed possession.
Anaphora
Lines 5 to 7 begin “In every cry,” “In every Infant’s cry,” “In every voice,” and line 7 repeats the phrase inside itself with “in every ban.” The word “every” appears five times in the second stanza and seven times in the poem, counting line 3 and the capitalised “Every” that opens line 10. The pattern lets Blake stop giving examples and start claiming a rule.
Auditory imagery
Cries, a voice, a ban, a sigh and a curse fill lines 5 to 14, and the speaker names his own sense twice, in line 8 and again in line 13. The first stanza is the only one built on seeing, and even there the faces are read for marks rather than looked at. What pictures follow, the blackening church of line 10 and the blood of line 12, are what the sounds are said to do. A reader who listens to this poem gets more of it than a reader who pictures it.
Metaphor
“The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” (line 8) turns restraint into ironwork. Manacles are wrist irons, and “forg’d” puts them on an anvil, so the chains are manufactured goods with a maker. Blake does not say whose mind forges them, and the guesses range from the sufferers who have learned to accept their condition to the rulers and priests who supply the ideas. The word “forg’d” can also carry the sense of counterfeit, which would make the chains both real and a fake.
Metonymy
“Church” in line 10 and “Palace” in line 12 are buildings standing in for the institutions housed in them, organised religion and the Crown. Blake accuses nobody by name and puts no person in either building. The soot and the blood land on the walls instead, which keeps the charge general and makes it harder to answer.
Oxymoron
“Marriage hearse” (line 16) joins two carriages that should never be the same vehicle, the one that carries a couple to a wedding and the one that carries a body to a grave. The phrase does its damage in two words, and the verbs around it, “Blasts” and “blights with plagues,” come from disease and crop failure.
Themes in London
Freedom that has been granted, and therefore owned
A charter is a legal grant: it hands over rights, liberties or a monopoly, and city charters and trading charters were ordinary things in Blake’s London. Calling a street and the Thames “charter’d” in lines 1 and 2 says that even the ground and the water come with an owner and a licence. The word cuts both ways, since a charter was also the classic English word for a guarantee of liberty, and the poem makes it sound like a fence.
Chains made in the mind
The manacles of line 8 are heard, not seen, and they are forged rather than fastened. Nothing in the poem is padlocked and nobody is arrested. What binds the city is something people carry inside their heads, which makes it harder to blame a single villain and harder to cut off.
Institutions living off the people they should protect
The Church is blackened by the cry of the boy who cleans its flues (lines 9 to 10). The Palace has blood on its walls from the soldier who serves it (lines 11 to 12). Marriage carries plague from the street it pretends to have nothing to do with (lines 14 to 16). Each institution is linked to the person it is failing.
A city known by ear
After four lines of faces, the poem becomes a soundtrack: cries, a voice, a ban, a sigh, a curse. Suffering in this London is audible everywhere and invisible to anyone not listening, and the speaker’s only action is to keep hearing it.
Images and symbols
The chartered Thames
A river is the oldest thing in a city and the hardest to fence. Putting a charter on it in line 2 is the poem’s quickest way of saying that ownership has reached everything, including what moves and cannot be held.
The blackening Church
Soot from thousands of coal fires really did blacken London stone, and the sweeps who cleaned the flues were children. In line 10 the darkening is both physical and moral, and the church is being stained by the labour that keeps it warm.
Blood on the Palace walls
A sigh cannot run down a wall, so the image of line 12 converts a soldier’s breath into the blood it will become. Readers often connect the picture to the wars and revolutions of the 1790s, though the poem names no war and no country.
The Marriage hearse
The wedding carriage and the funeral carriage become one vehicle in line 16. The image gathers up the whole poem, since a marriage is the one institution here that ordinary people enter by choice.
Patterns
Mark. Line 3 uses “mark” as a verb, meaning to notice, and line 4 uses “Marks” twice as a noun, meaning the signs left on a face. The same syllable slides from the act of seeing to the damage seen, and it also carries the sense of a mark set on a thing to show who owns it.
Cry. The word appears three times, in lines 5, 6 and 9, attached to a man, an infant and a chimney-sweeper. A cry can be a shout of pain or a street seller’s shout for work, and the sweeper’s cry was literally both.
Tensions
The walker vs. the chartered city. One person moves freely through streets that the first line has already declared licensed. The speaker can go anywhere and change nothing, and the poem’s refusal to end in a demand or a remedy keeps that imbalance in place.
Suffering vs. the institutions meant to relieve it. Church, Palace and marriage appear only in contact with the people they harm. Blake never stages an argument between them and their victims; he just puts the sound of one against the walls of the other.
How London ends, explained
The final stanza moves to midnight and to the sound the speaker calls worst of all. A young prostitute’s curse “Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,” and then “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.” The verbs come from disease and ruined crops, and the last two words put a wedding and a funeral in the same carriage.
Readers do not agree on what the phrase names, and the main readings are worth holding together. One is medical. “Curse” and “plagues” are read as venereal disease, carried from the street into the marriage bed and on to a child who may be born infected or blind, so the marriage becomes the vehicle that delivers the sickness. A second is social. Marriage as a legal and economic institution is what produces the trade in the first place, so the wedding coach and the hearse were always the same coach, and the attack falls on the institution rather than on the woman in the street. A third keeps “curse” literal: she is cursing, and it is the sound of her cursing, not an infection, that blasts the infant’s tear. Readers also split on whose infant it is, the child born inside the marriage or her own.
Blake picks none of them. The poem stops on “hearse,” with no remedy offered and no way out of the chartered streets it started in.
“I wander thro’ each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,”
“The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”
“And the hapless Soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls.”
“And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”
Common misreadings
Myth“Charter’d” means hired or rented, the way a boat or a coach is chartered.
ActuallyHere it carries the older legal sense: granted by charter. A charter handed over rights, liberties or a trading monopoly, so a chartered street and a chartered river are property held under licence. Part of the sting is that English writers used “charter” as a word for guaranteed liberty, and Blake makes it sound like a boundary fence.
MythThe poem is a description of what Blake sees on his walk.
ActuallyOnly the first stanza is built on what he sees. From line 5 on it listens: cries, a voice, a ban, a sigh, a curse, with “I hear” in line 8 and again in line 13. The images that remain, the blackening church of line 10 and the blood of line 12, are what those sounds do.
MythThe “Marriage hearse” in line 16 is a real hearse at a real funeral.
ActuallyIt is a contradiction in two words, a wedding carriage named as a funeral one. What it stands for is genuinely disputed, with disease, the institution of marriage itself, and the spoken curse all proposed, and the poem does not settle it.
AP practice a poetry prompt in the exam's style
Read William Blake’s “London,” engraved in 1794 for Songs of Experience. Then write an essay that analyzes how Blake uses literary elements and techniques to convey a complex perspective on a city and the institutions that govern it.
What a strong response notices
- Lines 1–2: “charter’d” twice in two lines, stretched from a street to the Thames, so ownership covers even what flows.
- Lines 3–4: “mark” as a verb and then “Marks” twice as a noun, which slides from the act of noticing to the damage noticed.
- Lines 5–7: the anaphora of “In every,” five uses of “every” in one stanza, turning separate people into one condition before line 8 names its cause.
- Lines 9–12: the shortened seven-syllable lines and the metonymy of Church and Palace, where a child’s cry blackens one building and a soldier’s sigh bloodies another.
- Lines 13–16: “But most” ranks the survey and drops the poem into midnight, and the closing oxymoron “Marriage hearse” ends it without a remedy.
Practice prompt written by StoryBites, not taken from a College Board exam. See the AP Literature free-response guide for how answers are scored.
Test yourself
1. What does “charter’d” mean in the poem’s first two lines?
A charter was a legal grant of rights, liberties or a monopoly. Calling a street and a river chartered says both are held under licence by somebody.
2. How many times does the word “every” appear in the second stanza?
Lines 5 and 7 each use it twice and line 6 uses it once, which makes five in that stanza and seven in the whole poem.
3. What is the poem’s rhyme scheme?
Every stanza alternates: street and meet against flow and woe, Man and ban against fear and hear, and so on through all four quatrains.
4. In lines 11 and 12, what runs down the Palace walls?
The sigh of the soldier “Runs in blood down Palace walls,” so his death is charged to the institution that sent him.
5. Why is “Marriage hearse” in line 16 called an oxymoron?
An oxymoron pairs terms that contradict each other. A marriage carriage and a hearse are opposite vehicles, and Blake makes them one.
Flashcards flip, self-grade, and the deck remembers what you know
Nice work.
William Blake walked around London in the 1790s and wrote down what he heard. Every street he passes is chartered, which means somebody has been granted the right to own it and license what goes on there. Every face he meets carries a mark of weakness or sadness. He hears a man cry, a baby cry, a chimney sweep cry, a soldier sigh and a young woman curse. He says the chains people wear were made in the mind, not in a blacksmith’s shop. A church and a palace stand right there while all of it happens. The poem ends by putting a wedding and a funeral into the same two words.
Compare & connect
London’s Summer Morning
The closest possible pair. Blake engraved his London in 1794 and Robinson printed hers in 1800, and both walk the same city and build the poem out of street sounds. Robinson counts trades and noises, a chimney-boy bawling for work, a dustman’s bell, carts and sellers, and finds the morning busy. Blake hears the same chimney-sweeper and registers only suffering. Reading them together shows how much of a poem’s meaning comes from what the listener is listening for.
The Chimney Sweeper
Line 9 of London gives the climbing boy a single cry. The Songs of Innocence poem hands him twenty-four lines and a name for his friend, so the two together show Blake moving between a whole life and one sound in a street.
We Wear the Mask
Both poems read faces in a crowd. Blake finds marks of weakness and woe on every face he meets; Dunbar’s speaker describes a face trained to show nothing at all. Put side by side they ask whether public suffering is visible or hidden.
Discussion and essay prompts:
💬 Discussion questions
- What is the meaning of London by William Blake
- What does charter’d mean in Blake’s London
- What are the mind-forg’d manacles in London
- How does London explore the theme of freedom that has been granted, and therefore owned?
- How does London explore the theme of chains made in the mind?
- What is the central conflict in London, and how does it shape the ending?
✎ Essay prompts
- Analyze how William Blake develops the theme of freedom that has been granted, and therefore owned in London. Support your argument with specific evidence from the text.
- Examine the significance of the chartered Thames in London. What does it represent, and how does it deepen the work’s meaning?
- How does William Blake use repetition of a single word to shape the reader’s experience of London?
- Some readers assume that “Charter’d” means hired or rented, the way a boat or a coach is chartered. Argue for or against this interpretation, using evidence from the text.
Key questions students ask
- What is the meaning of London by William Blake
- What does charter’d mean in Blake’s London
- What are the mind-forg’d manacles in London
- What does the Marriage hearse mean at the end of London
- What is the rhyme scheme and meter of Blake’s London
- How does Blake’s London compare with London’s Summer Morning by Mary Robinson
Analysis is original StoryBites commentary. The poem is printed from the Wikisource transcription of Blake’s own engraved text, in the 1826 copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It is in the public domain.