The first two lines of "London" feature repetition, a literary device Blake uses several times in this poem. The word "charter’d," meaning "mapped," is repeated, showing that the city is mapped out in a way that is characteristic of urban life. This type of restriction is in contrast to the freedom of the countryside. In the next two lines, the word "mark" is repeated three times as a means of emphasizing the way in which the polluted city marks its inhabitants. In the following stanza, the word "cry" is repeated (and "cry" also appears in the third stanza), as is the word "every." The repetition of the word "cry" emphasizes the suffering of both adults and children in London. The repetition of the word "every" is a form of anaphora, which is the repetition of a word at the beginning of phrases that follow each other, and it serves to emphasize how this suffering characterizes everyone the poet sees in the city. Many phrases in this stanza also start with "in," another example of an anaphora.
In the third stanza, the words "Church" and "Palace" are synecdoches--the substitution of part of something for its whole. For example, "Church" stands for religion, while "Palace" stands for the monarchy. Both of these institutions are oblivious to the cries of the people around them.
In the last stanza, the phrase "Marriage hearse" is a kind of oxymoron, or a joining of contrasts. The idea behind this phrase is that the infant is born to a mother who is a prostitute and curses her newborn child. The child's birth is both a marriage, or the result of a sexual union, and a death sentence, as the woman has a plague. Therefore, even birth brings with it the taint of death in "London."
Friday, October 18, 2019
What is an analysis of the poetic devices used in "London" by William Blake?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment