文档介绍：London
I wander thro 'each charter 'street,
Near where the charter 'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weak ness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg 'd manacles I hear
How the Chimn ey-sweepers cry
Every black 'ning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro ' midni ght streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
The poem London was written by the British poet and engraver William Blake. It has 4 quatrains with alternative lines rhyming. Written in iambic pentameter, the poem is beautifully rhymed.
London deals with
the dreadful
scene in the industrialized
London in the 18th
century.
In the first
stanza,
Blake
gives an
overview of the
city and successfully
creates
the gloomy,
dark
and
suffocating
atmosphere.
Blake applies varied
rhetorical
devices in the
poem,
of which
the most striking and significant is
repetition. For example, the word “chartered ”is reiterated in line 1 and line 2 to
emphasize the fact that the streets and river are owned by the wealthy upper class.
And the word “mark ”occurs in “mark in every face I meet ”(line 3) and “mark of weakness, mark of woe ”(line 4). The transition of the wo