Composition

As the title suggests, “London” by William Blake is a poem describing the London experience in the eighteenth century.

The poem is made of four stanzas with four verses each. This type of stanza is also called quatrain. The verses are medium length.

The poem was also illustrated. The picture for this poem depicts a poor crippled man with long white beard and a small child trying to help him.  Below the main picture, there is another drawing of a man sitting on his knees, getting warm next to a fire. This images are representations of the miserable conditions Londoners lived in, which the author talks about in the poem.

Each stanza describes a particular London image:

In the first stanza, the narrator walks along the Thames River and meets sad faces.

In the second stanza, he further emphasises the sadness and fear of men and children, which seems maddening.

In the third stanza, the speaker talks about two categories of people, the chimney-man and the soldier. Both are helpless and doomed to live a miserable life, even if their occupations are so different.

In the fourth and last stanza, the speaker ends his poem by talking about the misery of prostitutes and children born in poverty, without any future....