Blake's "London" is written chiefly in iambic tetrameter, in four-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme ABAB. I say "chiefly" because there are variations on the meter throughout the poem, as in, for instance, the fourth line of stanza 1:
Marks of weakness, marks of woe
The pattern here is stressed/unstressed, so it is trochaic instead of iambic, and there are only seven syllables in the line instead of eight. In stanza 3, all the lines follow this meter.
The striking lines about the "soldier's sigh" that "runs in blood down palace walls" are obvious allusions to the endless wars Britain and all the European powers engaged in at that time. Blake's point is the unfairness of a system in which the monarchy wages war for its own benefit, and soldiers, generally men impressed (i.e., forced) into military service, are the ones who pay for it with their lives. It is interesting that Blake published "London" as part of his Songs of Experience in 1794, only two years into the 23-year period of almost continuous wars triggered by the French Revolution that engulfed all of Europe. In some sense, his allusion was prophetic, but warfare was practically the normal state of affairs at that time. The eighteenth century had already seen the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence (which became a general European conflict beginning in 1778), and others, even before the French Revolution was opposed by the other European powers.
In my view, however, an even more important allusion in the poem occurs in the final stanza. In mentioning "the marriage hearse" and "the youthful harlot's curse," Blake is arguably alluding to the patriarchal system of gender dominance, symbolized by the traditional marriages of the time that limited or destroyed women's freedom, as analogous, in a way, to prostitution.
Blake manipulates the meter in "London" for expressive reasons; much of the poem is in iambic tetrameter, but in the third stanza he uses seven syllables per line instead of eight. The entire poem is a departure from the English sonnet; the rhyme scheme suggests it, but Blake does not adopt the form (iambic pentameter) a sonnet would have.
Blake utilizes a consistent alternating (abab) rhyme scheme in each of the four stanzas; for example, in stanza one, Blake rhymes the last words of the lines by using "street' and "meet" (lines one and three) and "flow" and "woe" (lines two and four).
Blake repeats the word "chartered" in line two after using it in line one to highlight a practice he found objectionable: allowing only specific, elite people to have certain rights and ownership. The line "Runs in blood down Palace walls" is a direct allusion to the French Revolution in which the monarchy was overthrown.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43673/london-56d222777e969
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