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scream that goes through the house: we are interconnected, inevitably and across boundaries of all kinds.
The poem's first stanza rips apart the notion of "chartered," precisely by contrasting the man-made (government-ordained) order of city streets against the fluid, uncontrollable river whose course may be traced but whose power cannot be regulated. More than two centuries after the writing of this poem, at a time when we are numbed by the ecological disasters that seem almost routinely to lay waste to our orderly landscapes—floods, earthquakes, hurricanes (along with the famine, disease, and social catastrophes they leave in their wake)—we rediscover something of the inherent unruliness in Blake's ironic lines, an un-ruliness that points up the arrogance of complacent urban and political design. But that first stanza also broadcasts the quintessential breakthrough of the poem: the poet reads individual pain as a collective grammar ("marks of weakness, marks of woe"), sees every London face as luminous and legible, like a billboard announcing its message. Something insistendy diagnostic, downright medical, is happening here: the translation of human countenance into affective and ideological symptom.
For this doctor-poet the city dwellers are indeed ill. It comes through the ears as well as the eyes. "Cry" is twice stated, to tell us that acculturated adults are hardly different from newborn babes in their expression of life's hurt. But the poet's aural apprehension reaches a new plateau altogether when he assesses London noise as "mind-forged manacles." Is there any formulation in English that quite rivals these terms for saying ideological repression? With remarkable economy and pith, these words denote culture itself as imprisonment, as internalized ("self-willed" in some horrible, almost artisanal sense) incarceration, a building project (it would seem) of lifelong duration whose (mad? tragic? evil?) purpose is penal. But perhaps the most striking feature of Blake's notation is this: this act of penitential submission and deformation, this systematic undoing of agency, far from being silently at work in the dark (as one would expect) is heard. The poet hears the manacles—
I think of Jacob Marley clanking up those stairs on his way to Ebenezer Scrooge—and we must wonder: just how metaphoric is this? Just as every urban face is an open book, so is every London sound rendered as the clink of chains and prison. One might cavil that such perception is reductive (after all, London is a big and various place), but it is also grand in its incessant translation of inner life —pain, misery, powerlessness—into public notation, indeed into spectacle, uncannily seen and heard. And this is the poem's central strategic gambit: to transform locked-in, hidden, personal hurt into explosive, luminous public script.
The force of such a move is felt only if we contrast it with what we know of common experience. The initial premise I began with, notably that we are alone in our misery, can be complemented by premise number two: we are likewise in the dark when it comes to the misery of others. But in this poem private misery crosses a representational threshold, becomes a common language. One might counter that only the visionary poet is privy to this public broadcast, but the very act of reading the poem forces us to realize that the institution of poetry is a public broadcast, bringing every reader into Blake's field of vision.
Reading is the visionary experience of civilized life. Reading Blake's "London" zones you into frequencies you've never heard, assaults you with images of the living city as carnivorous and corrupt as Moloch devouring its citizens. (Fritz Lang's great film of the 1920s, Metropolis, with its man-eating machines and herdlike workers, is not a bad analogue for Blake's vision of systemic exploitation.) On this head, art itself gets reconceived, moved from the esoteric margins as high-culture frill all
The poem's first stanza rips apart the notion of "chartered," precisely by contrasting the man-made (government-ordained) order of city streets against the fluid, uncontrollable river whose course may be traced but whose power cannot be regulated. More than two centuries after the writing of this poem, at a time when we are numbed by the ecological disasters that seem almost routinely to lay waste to our orderly landscapes—floods, earthquakes, hurricanes (along with the famine, disease, and social catastrophes they leave in their wake)—we rediscover something of the inherent unruliness in Blake's ironic lines, an un-ruliness that points up the arrogance of complacent urban and political design. But that first stanza also broadcasts the quintessential breakthrough of the poem: the poet reads individual pain as a collective grammar ("marks of weakness, marks of woe"), sees every London face as luminous and legible, like a billboard announcing its message. Something insistendy diagnostic, downright medical, is happening here: the translation of human countenance into affective and ideological symptom.
For this doctor-poet the city dwellers are indeed ill. It comes through the ears as well as the eyes. "Cry" is twice stated, to tell us that acculturated adults are hardly different from newborn babes in their expression of life's hurt. But the poet's aural apprehension reaches a new plateau altogether when he assesses London noise as "mind-forged manacles." Is there any formulation in English that quite rivals these terms for saying ideological repression? With remarkable economy and pith, these words denote culture itself as imprisonment, as internalized ("self-willed" in some horrible, almost artisanal sense) incarceration, a building project (it would seem) of lifelong duration whose (mad? tragic? evil?) purpose is penal. But perhaps the most striking feature of Blake's notation is this: this act of penitential submission and deformation, this systematic undoing of agency, far from being silently at work in the dark (as one would expect) is heard. The poet hears the manacles—
I think of Jacob Marley clanking up those stairs on his way to Ebenezer Scrooge—and we must wonder: just how metaphoric is this? Just as every urban face is an open book, so is every London sound rendered as the clink of chains and prison. One might cavil that such perception is reductive (after all, London is a big and various place), but it is also grand in its incessant translation of inner life —pain, misery, powerlessness—into public notation, indeed into spectacle, uncannily seen and heard. And this is the poem's central strategic gambit: to transform locked-in, hidden, personal hurt into explosive, luminous public script.
The force of such a move is felt only if we contrast it with what we know of common experience. The initial premise I began with, notably that we are alone in our misery, can be complemented by premise number two: we are likewise in the dark when it comes to the misery of others. But in this poem private misery crosses a representational threshold, becomes a common language. One might counter that only the visionary poet is privy to this public broadcast, but the very act of reading the poem forces us to realize that the institution of poetry is a public broadcast, bringing every reader into Blake's field of vision.
Reading is the visionary experience of civilized life. Reading Blake's "London" zones you into frequencies you've never heard, assaults you with images of the living city as carnivorous and corrupt as Moloch devouring its citizens. (Fritz Lang's great film of the 1920s, Metropolis, with its man-eating machines and herdlike workers, is not a bad analogue for Blake's vision of systemic exploitation.) On this head, art itself gets reconceived, moved from the esoteric margins as high-culture frill all
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