How does William Blake's speaker present the themes of restriction and control in his poem 'London'? Consider the physical and psychological representation of these themes in your answer.
William Blake’s 1794 poem 'London' is one of the most recognisable entries in his seminal work Songs of Experience. It depicts a hopeless and morose version of the English capital because it presents the themes of restriction and control by pointing out how frequently they occur in everyday life. The poem sets up physical restrictions in how it navigates the spatial and social implications of its imagery, and also points out psychological controls in how it presents awareness, and time. The ‘charter’d street’ is described as such because it is defined by how its route is mapped out into physical space. It is ‘charter’d’ because it has been built in such a way that it is more profitable to the traders and merchants of 16th century urbanity; the environment is shaped and moulded into a machine, a systematic series of restrictions, that forces its inhabitants to move through the city in a certain way and exist with a mentality that is formed in the absence of open spaces. The poem enforces this urban restriction onto the natural landmarks of the city; even ‘the charter’d Thames’ cannot escape the structures of industry. The conurbation, measurement and domination of the natural world is incorporated into ‘London’s’ imagery to point out the extent to which natural and unnatural space has been twisted to suit the obstructive principles of trade. Mankind’s encroachment onto the natural world is a chilling side-effect of this process. Physical restriction occurs at both a personal level, in terms of how the streets are structured and everyday life must be routed, but also on a wider spatial level, in terms of how the land is organised, how trade agreements are arranged on the urban and natural landscapes.
Blake’s infamous ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ accurately sum up the way the poem approaches the representation of psychological restriction. Once again, the themes of restriction and control are shown to be pervasive in the capital as the manacles are said to appear ‘in every cry of every Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear, in every voice: in every ban’. This notion of widespread social control starts plainly because every man that cries out represents a circumstance of discontent, a hopeless scenario that is as common as it is dehumanising. The next line subverts the meaning of its predecessor by actualising it as part of a timeline; the cry of the infant suggests that every life-stage up until adulthood (and by implication early death) is confined to a life as miserable as the cries the poem so frequently describes. It is important that the language of the poem begins to engage with time in such a way that it spans generations. The ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ are formed over a significant period of time. They come into play when the mind is no longer aware of the restrictions imposed upon it, when the individual is utterly used to the unhappiness and injustice of their situation. Perhaps the greatest restrictions are so engrained that they do not feel like restrictions anymore. Therefore, psychological restrictions occur on both a personal basis insomuch as the mind wants something that the body cannot provide but also on a generational level whereby time starts to disguise control mechanisms as an inescapable fact of life.
