There are fifteen poems in the GCSE Power & Conflict anthology.

For your exam, you will be given one poem in full, printed on the page, and you will be asked to compare this poem to another from the anthology.

All of the GCSE English Literature course is closed-book, meaning that you will need to learn at least three lines from each poem.

It is possible to get top marks for this question by making sure that you know the following:

• What the poem is about

• What the poem means

• The methods the poet uses to convey their message

• The links between the ideas of other poems in the anthology

Synposis

Whatever the question is, it is important that you understand what the poem is about. This will support you in adapting your argument to fit the focus of the question. This section includes:

• A general overview of the poem

• A detailed look at the poem line-by-line

• Analysis of the poem, giving William Blake’s intention and message

A general overview of the poem

London explores the perceived moral and physical decay of the capital city of England, and, by extension therefore, the country as a whole. The speaker, likely a manifest version of the poet himself, explores the city and reflects on its corruption and ugliness. The poem depicts the Romantic poet’s horror when his sensibilities are confronted with London’s ubiquitous darkness and suffering.

Line-by-Line

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

The poem’s neat opening stanza (initially capitalised lines, stable meter, alternating rhyme scheme) has its slickness undermined by the fourth line’s bleak content: the alliterative abstract nouns “weakness [and] woe”. However, the tone has already been subtly foreshadowed before this by the repeated adjective “charter’d” in lines one and two. Whilst not inherently diabolical, “charter’d” does hint nevertheless at a dark truth: that these features of London are owned and regulated by those in power. Total sovereignty allotted to ‘owners’ is problematic enough for “street[s]”, but is practically obscene for a feature of nature like a river (“the [...] Thames”) – especially to a Romantic poet like Blake who would worship the natural world.

For the first of what will be many times, the determiner “every” is used, referring to the “face[s]” on which the “marks of weakness [and] woe” can be “mark[ed]”. Along with “each” in the first line, referring to the “street[s]” that are “charter’d”, there is a sense of the universal, here. The comments made, about oppression and suffering, apply to the entirety of the city – and, it may be argued, the whole country (if we take London, the capital, as synecdochic of England, the country).

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

The second stanza doubles down on the themes established by the first. Now we have the determiner “every” used a grand total of five times, which tips into the realm of the absurd. Also repeated is the noun “cry” (twice). In those cries, of both “Man” and “Infant[...]”, the speaker can perceive “mind-forg’d manacles”, that is, restrictions on freedom – perhaps including “ban[s]” from the preceding lines. Even if not attributed to edicts and oppression, the abundance and universality of the cries points to a city teeming with suffering. Whilst this stanza is not as specific as the stanzas before and after it, due to a lack of proper nouns or individual examples, the tone is nevertheless decidedly bleak.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry

Every black'ning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.

The third and penultimate stanza becomes more specific in its blame for the universal suffering and oppression in the city, building on the references to “charter[s]” in the first stanza. The references to both victims (“Chimney-sweeper[s]” and “hapless Soldier[s]”) and perpetrators (the “Church” and the “Palace”, i.e. the Church of England and the monarchy) are direct and condemnatory. The victims “cry”, “bl[ee]d” and “sigh”, whilst the perpetrators “appall[...]”. The suffering of the chimney-sweeper and soldier, whilst obviously geographically distant from the Church and Palace is tied inextricably to them by the verbs; the “black’ning Church appalls” the chimney sweeper’s cry, and the soldier’s “sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls”. Blake makes no excuses for these pillars of power.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

The final stanza concludes with the assertion that the “most” audible and thus significant facet of moral decay in the city is the “youthful Harlot’s curse”. It is unclear whether Blake is condemning the existence of “Harlot[s]” (prostitutes) in a moral society, in favour family values wherein the “new-born Infant[...]” would be cared for rather than shouted at (“curse[d]”) and “Marriage” would be preserved rather than doomed to a “hearse”. Alternatively, it could be a comment on venereal disease (STDs): the “Harlot’s curse” that can famously infect an “Infant[...]” in the womb, before “blight[ing] with plagues” the wife of a husband visiting a prostitute, thus killing them both: “the Marriage hearse”. Whatever the case, it is condemnatory.

Writer’s Methods

This section aims to support your revision by providing you with concrete and clear examples of methods that William Blake uses. 

Remember: methods support meaning, not the other way round. You will gain more marks focusing your essays on the big ideas of the poems and then supporting these ideas with the methods that the writer uses.

Form

The poem is divided into four equal stanzas, all containing a tight iambic rhythm and consistent alternating rhyme scheme, as well as universal initially capitalised lines and a total absence of effective caesurae. Formally, then, this poem is incredibly neat and stable, standing in stark contrast to its content, which is bleak and chaotic. One may argue that the Romantic poet is romanticising: formally constraining the chaos to effect its resolution.

Structure

The poem is structured, stanza by stanza, around the different aspects of moral decay perceived by the speaker (and poet, we can presume). The first stanza gives a first impression of a rigorously controlled city that causes suffering; the second stanza explores the miserable consequences of this excess control; the third stanza blames the Church and the monarchy specifically for their failings, and specifies the victims of it; and the final stanza engages with the perceived moral villainy of prostitution and its effects. There is a cumulative effect in this structure.

Language

Throughout the poem, the repetition of the determiner “every” is striking. Blake is asserting in no uncertain terms that what is being observed is not isolated horror, but rather the nature of the entire city. Relatedly, the use of initial capitalisation for certain words in the poem, rendering them proper nouns, is a way of making these individuals into archetypes (that is, that they stand for all of their kind) – so “Man”, “Infant”, “Chimney-sweeper”, “Soldier” and “Harlot” are all representatives of their category, thereby universalising their experience.

Context

At MyEdSpace, we use this analogy to discuss context – ketchup, salt and chips.

If you ordered a portion of chips, and asked for salt, you wouldn’t then dump the salt into the corner of your chips and start dipping each individual chip into the salt. 

When you put salt on your chips, you sprinkle it over, sparingly, so as to give a good coverage of salt across the chips as a whole. Context is just like salt on chips. 

Context is not ketchup – because it would be appropriate to squeeze ketchup into the corner of your plate and dip each chip in (and in fact, that is advised).

So when you’re including contextual information in your essays, sprinkle it across the essay, just like you sprinkle salt on your chips.

Let’s link the context to the key ideas and themes of the poem.

Biographical Insight

Blake was another Romantic poet, and social justice warrior, who rejected the Enlightenment’s obsession with progress and rationality, particularly as represented by the effect of the Industrial Revolution on England: poverty, injustice and oppression, as he saw it. 

Publication Context

This poem comes from the “of Experience” section of his collection of poems, Songs of Innocence and Experience, representing the progressively more cynical worldview he adopted as he grew up and recognised the degradation of society and of nature.

Comparison

You are required to write an essay in your exam that is a comparison of the ideas and themes explored in two poems from the Power & Conflict anthology. Therefore, it is very important to revise the poems in pairs and to enter the exam with an idea of what poem you will choose to compare once you know what the named poem is.

London and Checking Out Me History

Both poems depict types of oppression from national-scale sources of power and control. Both poems explore the impact on individual freedom and prosperity that comes from paternalistic force and subjugation. However, London focuses on the city-wide and broad-spectrum manifestation of oppression, whilst Checking Out Me History focuses on the individual experience of education-specific oppression.

Similarity:

Both poems depict a loss of freedom on the part of those under the influence of those in power.

Evidence and Analysis 

Blake’s poem depicts oppressed individuals wrestling with their oppression and its constraints on their freedom. The speaker deploys a semantic field of restraint throughout the poem, such as “charter’d”, “ban” and “manacles”, instilling a sense of forced confinement on the populace. Chartering controls ownership; bans control freedom; and manacles control movement. From every angle, Londoners are restricted.

Agard’s poem depicts oppressed learners subjugated into positions of passive acceptance. Repeatedly, the refrain “dem tell me” is deployed, the grammar of which strips the speaker (and more broadly the learner) of agency. The nonstandard subject pronoun “dem” and object pronoun “me” place the power in the hands of the enigmatic “dem”, as they forcefully “tell” the speaker what he is expected to accept.

Difference:

The poets present different forms of grand-scale oppression.

Evidence and Analysis

William Blake’s speaker focuses on oppression that controls behaviour directly.

His poem depicts victims whose fate is in others’ hands. The chimney-sweepers will “cry” because they are forced to work in heinous conditions (perhaps due to a lack of aid from the “black’ing Church”), and the soldiers will “sigh” because they have been ordered to march toward their likely death, not to mention all the other figures whose lifestyles are forced misery in the poem. Note that the verbs, “cry” and “sigh”, are not action-based verbs but rather indicators of helpless hopelessness.

Contrastingly, in Agard’s, the speaker presents oppression more subtly and insidiously: through educational whitewashing.

In his poem, the student-speaker laments how what he learns is dictated by those in power: the mysterious “dem”. Throughout the poem, the litany of examples of eurocentric history are preceded by the refrain “dem tell me” whilst the paltry examples of black history are preceded by “dem never tell me”, indicating that there is deliberate control over the narrative in the history curriculum. Only when the speaker’s verbs are active (e.g. “I carving”) do we see a chance for change; rebellion comes from undermining that influence.