Thursday, July 14, 2011

Deconstructive analysis of "London" by William Blake!?

The speaker sees London as a place characterized by contradictions. The government is two faced: it charters rivers (insists on payment for the right to use the rivers and maps them out for the purpose of encouraging money-making--so it both takes and gives). People marry as an expression of bonding, and babies cry (though out of fear), but these are not acts of liberty or free expression; they are indications of restraint and imprisonment. Soldiers die to defend a country that in turn kills them. The chimney sweeps metaphorically whiten ("appall") the churches by declaring, involuntarily, their innocence--an act that is a blot on those churches, also emblems of official London. At the root of all this is that the creation of life in London is identified with death: marriage is a hearse, presumably because the baby born to the whore is infected ("blasts") with her syphilis, so the infant is born already in the grave.

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