Futility by Wilfred Owen

This video analysis is helpful.

“London” by William Blake is a lyric ballad that expresses the tension, sounds, and meanings of a degenerate city.

Words that will help you understand this poem: The Industrial Revolution is the setting for this poem.

Aristocracy – this term refers to the rich land owners who controlled everything in London.

The plebeians or proletariat refers to the working class who were exploited by the aristocracy.

This poem is representative of English economic problems of the time

STRUCTURE

The poem is in four quatrains in iambic tetrameter, with a basic rhyme scheme starting a/b/a/b. The poem, describes a dark and sad city. This helps illustrates the tension in the poem’s voice, expressing sounds and anger that escapes beyond the boundaries of the poem itself. In this poem, Blake uses tight rhymes in a way of suggesting the limits of the medium he is employing. These limits of form help to express the limits and restrictions of London.

Capitalisation is used extensively throughout the poem, to infer something beyond the simple meaning of the word—it usually means something deeper. For instance, the capitalisation of Man in the second stanza suggests that the whole of urbanized society has gone to the state of moral decay and misery. “every Infants cry”—the capital letter shows that there is something beyond just children that the speaker meets. Capitalisation is also used in “Chimney-sweeper’s cry”, “Church”, “Soldier”, “Palace”, “Harlot”, and “Marriage”—usually to represent an idea beyond just the word, or an institution which will be criticised. For instance, “Soldier” represents the army, “Chimney-sweeper” represents child labour, “Harlot” represents prostitution, “Palace” symbolises royal family, etc.

STANZA 1

The poem starts with the personal pronoun “I” which suggests that Blake is presenting his personal observations of the condition of the city of London. He is an eye witness and this lends to the credibility of the message he is conveying.

In the first two lines the speaker describes his wandering through “charter’d streets” near the “charter’d Thames.” The word “Charter’d” implies a meaning of “given liberty,” but also means that such places are “pre-empted as private property,” and that the owners have the legal rights and privileges upon which the wealth of the city depends. More succinctly, the streets and Thames have been “mapped, licensed, controlled, and choked with commerce”. This rich meaning is quantified by the speakers description of the people that are met in the charter’d places. The repetitive use of the word “charter’d” stresses Blake’s anger at the political times and his feeling towards the ruling classes with their controlling laws and oppressive ways. He taunts them in the poem saying that it is not only every street they want to control but even the River Thames which should normally be free for all but in this case it too is “charter’d”.

In lines 3 and 4 the speaker describes what he sees. He repeats the word “mark” and this must be understood as follows:

“mark” in line 3 is a verb and means that he notices or becomes aware of the facial expressions of the people on the streets.

In line 4 “marks” is a noun. It refers to literal marks on the faces of the people. The repetition on the word “marks” stresses the despair and tiredness that they are going through because of living an oppressed way of life. Being a mystical person himself, Blake uses the expression “marks of woe” in an almost religious sense. He is the onlooker looking in and as he walks past the passers by he can see the weakness and misery marked on their faces due to their helplessness at not being able to bring about any changes in their destiny.

STANZA 2

Note that the first three lines of this stanza starts with the repetition of “In every …” This rhetorical technique is called anaphora and its purpose is to indicate the extent of the suffocating situation that people lived in. In other words the situation covered the city, no one was excluded.

In this stanza, Blake also appeals to the reader’s auditory sense. He uses words like “cry”, “cry”, “voice” and “hear”. This emphasis on hearing expresses the speaker’s desire for the reader to hear along with the poet, where sounds travel beyond the tight form of the ballad. The actual sounds of crying and the clanking of manacles cannot be contained within an iambic or rhyming form; they are sounds that are free, informal, and uncontainable.

The speaker describes the cry of every man and infant. These places are where the actual sounds of the restriction can be heard literally. The use of the word “hear” in lines 8 and 13, emphasises that the sounds of the poem are real and can be heard beyond the formal expression found in this ballad.

Though the feelings of every man and child he passes are suppressed, their hidden fears and suppressed cries are audible to him. Again his mystical side can be seen because throughout his lifetime Blake was said to have spiritual visions. Despite their silence, he can still hear all that they want to say. 

He uses the word “ban” which is quite clear in its meaning. It is because of fear of authority that there is lack of free expression, people are unable to voice their criticisms on how the country is being ruled. No one dares to speak out for fear of being imprisoned. The words “fear”, “cry”, “ban”, and “mind-forg’d manacles” describe a people who are suffering and frightened, they are imprisoned in their own minds.

The metaphor, “mind-forged manacles” is a rich image that expresses so much in such a little space. The image brings to one’s imagination a mental restriction on the Londoners. The term “mind-forged” implies that they are created internally in one’s person, but “manacles” bring to mind chains that are placed on someone by one in authority. This image shows the tension between internal and external forces that take away liberty, similar to the earlier use of the word “charter’d.”

           

Manacles like ‘charter’d,’ was one of the radical code words of the period that was directed at the oppression of the authorities”. By using this rich and multi-layered word, the image breaks beyond the form of the poem and expresses both the oppressor and oppressed in London.

In fact, the word forged is rich in meaning. It is a word used to form or shape metal by heating in a forge (furnace) and beating or hammering into shape. This is a process and suggests the process of indoctrination where the people of London were forced to accept the conditions placed upon them. This very process of “brainwashing’ is what has imprisoned them in their thinking and they have now accepted their plight of exploitation and suppression by the aristocracy.

STANZA 3

In the next stanza of the poem, the tension is portrayed by the interaction between victims and institutions. The oppressed are portrayed as actual people while the oppressors are illustrated as empty, dark buildings.

Who are the chimney-sweepers?

 

They were children who were enslaved to the chimney-sweeping trade or business which was a forceful symbol of London’s corruption. Blake’s London was a city of fireplaces burning coal in the houses of the aristocracy; at the same time, Londoners were familiar with troops of urchins marching through the streets in the early morning, carrying the brooms and buckets of their craft. These children were as young as three and four and no older than eight or nine, in order to fit into the narrow chimney stacks to clean them. They would be covered with the soot from the chimneys.  Their parents were poor and by selling children into forced child-labour, was a means of survival.

In lines 9-10, the cry of the “chimney-sweeper” should be heard by the church, but the “appalls” the church utters are trite and empty, because the church is “blackening,” devoid of light and goodness, but only knows death. The use of “appalls,” bring to mind the word “pall,” thus emphasising the black Church as coffin-like, filled with dead power and authority. These two little lines are not only an indictment of the child labour, but shows the impotence of moral authority to do something concerning it. The church oppresses by its lack of action and lack of light. The iambic rhythm in these lines lose their regularity, showing how the content is pushing up against the tight form of the ballad.

Also, according to Christianity the Church’s role is to alleviate the struggle of the oppressed and to bring light to the suffering. It is ironic that the Church instead turns its ear to the plight of the vulnerable, thus it is blackened.

“Blackening” is an easy and common word, but in this poem, the poet wonderfully chooses this word which literally means blackening with smoke, but metaphorically means blackening with shame at its failure to give that help. At the same time, this word contrasts with “appalls” which means makes pale.

“blackning” can also be understood in a literal sense. The industrial focus of the time meant that pollution from the factories covered buildings with grime and thus they appeared to be black.

The unlucky or unfortunate (hapless) soldier in line 11, sighs, possibly his last breath whose blood then will run down the walls of government. The sigh is a softer sound than the sounds that are heard elsewhere in the poem. The sigh is faint, because the dying soldier is far away in foreign lands, sacrificing his youth for the monarchal state. This image ties London with the whole world, like this small poem letting its ideas break beyond its immediate scope of London’s darkness, and shows it has no bounds. And even so the sigh is still powerful enough that it manifests its presence in the Palace as blood running down a wall, suggesting the Biblical image “the writing is on the wall,” - the poet is a prophet foretelling the government’s eventual fall. This sign like the crying and clanking previously, is also a sound that has no iambic tenor, thus showing again how these sounds cannot be contained with a traditional song.

The “palace walls” are the symbols of the power structure of the ruling power, the King or Queen. It is this power which starts the wars to which soldiers pay for with their lives.

In 1789, the French people revolted against the monarchy and aristocracy, using violence to overthrow those in power. Many saw the French Revolution as inspirational – a model for how ordinary, disadvantaged people could seize power. Blake alludes to the revolution, arguably suggesting that the experience of living there could encourage a revolution on the streets of the capital.

There is also a possible allusion to the Biblical account where Pontius Pilate (representing the authorities or government) said that he did not want the blood of Jesus on his hands, so he washed his hands. In other words, in London, the blood of the soldiers is on the government’s hands. The government is to blame for the premature loss of the soldiers’ lives while on the battlefield.

 

STANZA 4

The last stanza is filled with amazing imagery and sound. Another victim is brought forward, the “youthful Harlot,” whose diseases will turn marriages into death. The un-poetic sounds return to full force, where the speaker says, “I hear” the “blasts” which attempts to silence the tears of a baby. Interestingly, the speaker gives us a specific time he/she is walking through these streets – at “midnight,” which easily is a physical time, but also a spiritual time that London is stuck in, at the beginning of the apocalypse.

“Harlot” is a Biblical word, and is stronger than “prostitute”. By using this word, the poet expresses his deep worry and strong condemnation of the society. And thus, the last stanza is the most powerful part of the poem. The unfortunate women are forced to be harlots. Just according to their curses, we can see everything covered with darkness, so the wedding becomes a funeral. Here “marriage hearse” is an apparent contradiction and is a figure of speech known as an oxymoron. It is used satirically to compare the wedding to a funeral and foretells what kind of future England must be faced with if things go like this.

The “marriage hearse” suggests several things. The “marriage hearse” is the wedding carriage that turns deadly due to the harlot’s disease. With “marriage” and “hearse,” it echoes back to the “church” and “appalls,” suggesting marriage is an oppressor of omission. (In a literal sense, it has been suggested that the marriage laws promoted prostitution, and the population of female prostitutes at the time of the poem’s publication numbered around 50,000.

Young women had to resort to prostitution because of poverty and the speaker can hear her curses for what she has to endure. Her curses will affect the new born child and Blake uses powerful words like “blasts” which is a contrast to the gentleness one would use for a new born child. He can foresee the difficulties the child will have to suffer just like his mother has had to endure. In contrast, a rich woman getting married in a carriage will be blighted by this curse and her carriage might turn out to be a hearse. Blake is pointing a finger at the rich men who use the services of a prostitute and then get married and pass on sexually transmitted diseases to their wives. He uses the word “plagues” to signify the goings on of the rich and how their actions will plague the lives of all the innocent people involved. Blake’s poem, no matter how brutal and harsh in its message, has relevance even in modern times where poverty is rife in many countries due to huge income discrepancies between the rich and poor.

 

This image of the marriage hearse shows the tension between form and content. Like the proverbial riding into the sunset at the end of a film, the image of a “marriage hearse” brings is the deathly carriage that is leaving the confines of the poem, and carrying its deadly plague to the towns and cities outside “London.”