{#npm16: back to blake}

I was excited to find another proponent of the acrostic in my poetry meanderings, this one from the 18th century. This one is dark, dark, dark. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), William Blake’s “London” appears on the “Experience” side, and it isn’t much later that scholars begin to debate what the embedded word “hear” means in the text. Some have posited a religious meaning, while others, a meaning more political. Roy Neil Graves professor at the University of Tennessee at Martin shines a bit of light on things.

London

William Blake, 1757 – 1827

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.

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.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

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.

“London” is by consensus one of his strongest poems, a dark social comment that sketches city life in late 18th-century England. The “I” persona reports in present tense on the general misery of the people he encounters on a nighttime sweep through the city’s “charter’d streets.” His trip seems at once real and emblematic. The Londoners he sees, hears (yes, hears), and records are infants, young women, and men—chimney-sweepers, harlots, and soldiers. “Marriage” seems tainted by disease and death, and Church and Crown are the twin, faceless antagonists of a citizenry that includes newborns.

If you have time and enjoyed exploring Blake in college, this professor’s entire work is worth a read, as he includes Blake’s own hand-lettered poem and the artwork which goes with it – which, in true Blake-fashion, is a little chaotic. Even if you’re not a huge Blake fan, how exciting is it that we found more acrostics, even earlier than Victorian days! They were SUCH a Thing! Doubled, or singular or just with one word only appearing sometimes. Many are the ways they could be written…