“I wander thro’ each charter’d street For him man is always the wanderer in the oppressive and sterile world of materialism which only his imagination and love can render human. In a more difficult poem, characteristic of his deeper symbolism, he speaks of the world of matter

as A Fathomless & boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;

In “London,” however, the wandering is not a symbolic expression. In the modern city man has lost his real being, as he has already lost his gift of vision in the “fathomless and boundless” deep of his material nature. Blake here describes one man, himself, in a city that is only too real, the only city he ever knew—yet the largest in the world, the center of empire. The city stands revealed in the cry of every Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear. The wanderer in the chartered streets is concerned with a social picture and, in the face of so much suffering, with the social evil that some create and all permit. The extraordinary terseness of the poem stems from Blake’s integral vision of the suffering of man and his alienation from institutions as one. His indignation gives him the power of movement; it also leads him into the repetitions which dominate the tonal order of the poem —the every cry of every Man, the Infant’s cry of fear, till his tender vehemence swells into the generality of in every voice, in every ban.

Every is magic to Blake. Poetically he cannot go wrong on it, for it carries such a kernel of glory to his mind, it points so immediately to his burning human solidarity, that in using it he knows himself carried along by what is deepest to him. The mind-forg’d manacles, as central to his thought as any phrase he ever used, follows with a triumphant sweep right after it, and for an obvious reason. For he is one with every voice, every ban, and can now make his judgment. On this fresh creative impulse he leaps ahead to what is so complex, but for him so natural, a yoking of images:

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;

The young Chimney-sweeper is always dear to Blake, especially when he is condemned to get the soot out of the churches—an impossible task. He is the symbol of the child who is lost. He works among the waste-dirt of the Church, itself black with dogma and punitive zeal, and his own suffering makes it even blacker. Black’ ning is a verb of endless duration in present time for Blake. In his drawing to this poem, the Chimney-sweeper is shown in one comer struggling before a black flame. At the top of the page he stands in defiance before the blind and tottering old man, the fossilized Church, who seems to be pouring out fresh soot. The walls are the stone blocks of a prison. The whole page is marked, like the turn of the hand on a vehement signature, by a fierce black border. Pictorially and verbally we thus rise to a climax at the word appalls. The Church is not appalled by the Chimney-sweeper’s cry; the cry of the child, out of the midst of the Church, makes the Church appalling. Blake’s thrust is so swift and deep that he characteristically puts the whole burden of his protest, with its inner music, into four words. Every black and blackening Church is appalling, and in every way. The tone of palls to his ear, carrying the image of death, the grief and shame that will not rest, clangs with reverberations.

The unhappiness of the Soldier is not that of a man bleeding before a palace of which he is the sentry. Blake means that the Soldier’s desperation runs, like his own blood, in accusation down the walls of the ruling Palace. Blake’s own mind ran in so many channels at once, his vision of human existence was so total, that it probably never occurred to him that blood would mean anything less to others than it did to him. “Runs in blood down palace walls” is what Blake sees instantaneously in his mind when he thinks of the passivity and suffering of the Soldier. Blake is too much abreast of the reality he sees to use similes; he cannot deliberate to compare something to another. And he is equally incapable of using a metaphor with self-conscious daring. He saw the blood running down the ruler’s walls before thinking of blood as a “powerful” image. There is no careful audacity in him, the preparation for the humor of T.