It is said that no two men can reach identical opinions about anything. Needless to say, when it comes to such a great city as London, as well as London's society - anything goes. Or does it? The following three poets - William Blake, Jonathan Swift and William Wordsworth may have been three different men, and their poetry about London is different too, yet on a deep, fundamental level, their poems are analogous.
Jonathan Swift's ""A Description of a City Shower", which appeared on 17 October 1710 in Steele's Tatler, is companion to the earlier Description of the Morning, and, like it, was designed to parody current fashion, in this instance the use of the Drydenic triplet and alexandrine" culminating in "the closing paragraph, where parody rides to triumph on a magniloquent triplet and alexandrine" (The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift, 218-219). It should be noted that Swift's London is full of secular, petty people, who are more interested in the safety of their wigs and fine clothing (symbols of social status), rather than braving the elements (courage of the spirit). The city itself is already dirty and grimy: "sink/ strike your offended sense with double stink" (A Description of the City Shower, 5-6). The city of London is far from being a grand capital of the world - instead, it is a reeking garbage dump, and the incoming rain just makes it worse. "Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, / and bear their trophies with them as they go: / Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell/ what street they sailed forth, by sight and smell. / ....Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood." (A Description of the City Shower, 61-62) It can be safely said that Swift's "A Description of a City Shower", shows that London is not splendid, but dirty, amusing, and pathetic, like a clown, though the city also possesses some warmth. True, that Swift's Londoners are petty, rather selfish people, but they are certainly not nasty, or irredeemable, and the very filth of London is just a side effect of the city's social machine, made amusing, rather than merely unpleasant by Swift's satiric parody only, and Swift himself does not consider London's problems social, rather than just technical.
However, no matter how poor and ill-managed Swift's London is, it is nowhere as bad as Blake's "London" in Songs of Experience, where repetition is used emphasize the shock felt by Blake that inspired him to write "London". Blake's "London" is full of symbolism, related to the social inequality. "I wander through each chartered street, / ...where the chartered Thames does flow," reminds the reader (back in the 18th century) about charter not just as in "a statement of rights and responsibilities for both a country (state) and its citizens", but also as a "document of authorization that permits a company to use it" (Microsoftў Encartaў Reference Library 2003. ? 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.). In other words, everything in London, including the Thames, is owned by somebody - and that somebody is usually rather high in the society. What's more, that ownership is not restricted to just streets and even the river Thames (a supposedly public resource or property): "In every cry of every Man, / In every Infant's cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear". (London, 5-8) These "manacles" are laws, apparently unjust ones (like the one that made children work in places hazardous to health, like in chimneys or in mines), that make every man to cry out. At the same time "in every face I meet marks of weariness, marks of woe" - faces of the people, who are being literally worked to death, sometimes, while they are still almost infants, or little children, at any rate (like in another "Song of Experience" - "the Chimney Sweeper"). Notice that the church in Blake's "London" is "blackened", as well as appalled by "the Chimney-sweeper's cry" i.e. the cry of the little man, the working-class man.
Finally, there is one more thing. The last quatrain (there are four of them, with alternate rhyming) of "London", where "the youthful Harlot's curse / Blasts the new-born Infant's tear, / And blights with plagues the Marriage-hearse" (London, 13-16) mentions one other very unpleasant aspect of Blake's London - the prostitutes. Often they were women forced to fend for themselves, sometimes from an early age since the men in their family died because of work-related accidents, equally often transmitted sexual diseases such as syphilis that destroyed the families physically, as well as it destroyed them socially, causing men to leave their wives and children because of the easily available sex. Hence the "Marriage-hearse", which is essentially the "death of weddings" and social stability (family is a basic unit of a society).
Blake believed that the problems of London are social, not just man-made and technological, unlike Swift. As it was written before, the church in Blake's "London" is "blackened", as well as appalled by "...the Chimney-sweeper's cry" i.e. the cry of a little man, a working-class man. This makes Blake's "London" different from Swift's "City Shower" where most of the people: housewives, a student of the Law, a seamstress are just treated more mildly than compared with higher-class politicians and a noble lover in his sedan chair, but on the whole do not appear to be suffering from any sort of a great hardship.
The last poet's, William Wordsworth's, Petrarchian sonnet "London, 1802" was written, the social inequalities in England were somewhat smoothed out, yet he too is not happy about England's social conditions, as he wrote about them in iambic pentameter: "England.... Is a fen of stagnant waters...." "We are selfish men; ...raise us up, return to us again; / and give us manners, virtue, freedom, power." (London 1802, 6-8) As the Englishmen have forgotten about such values, they are now a breed vanquished by the power of evil, as Blake would put it.
For his part, Wordsworth here is addressing the past in the guise of deceased John Milton, who acquires some decisively God-like properties in the process in the eyes of frustrated Wordsworth: "Thy soul was like a Star.... Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: /Pure as the naked heavens.... Thou travel on life's common way/ in cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart/ the lowliest duties on herself did lay," concludes Wordsworth. (London 1802, 9-14) "In the tradition of activist poetry in England ... he (Wordsworth) was endeavoring to enact his conception of himself as a latter day Milton who would `raise [Englishmen] up' and `give [them] manners, virtue, freedom, power' (`London 1802' 7 and 8)" (Poetics and Politics 97), because they apparently forgot about them on their own. It should be noted that Wordsworth's poem, "London, 1802" is much more generalized in accusations, compared to Blake's similar-named poem. In Blake's poem, the lower classes are clearly oppressed - a Chimney-sweeper, a lowly Soldier of the English army is being downtrodden and slaughtered on behalf of those who live in the palaces. In Wordsworth's poem, on the other hand, all of England "is a fen/ of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, / Fireside, the heroic wealth of hearth and bower, / Have forfeited their ancient English dower/ of inward happiness." (London 1802, 2-4) Thus, if Blake's church is appalled over what is happening in London, then Wordsworth's altar, i.e. the church's is just as bad and spiritually hollow as everyone else, including, apparently now both the lower and the higher social classes.
This brings back the question: whether the attitudes of Blake, Swift, and Wordsworth towards London are different or not?
Here are three different poets - religious Blake, satirist Swift, and romantic Wordsworth, and fundamentally they all agree - London stinks, not merely physically, but spiritually, and it also can be concluded that this state of matters came to be over time. The only difference is the amount of this stench and how deeply it penetrates and permeates London. In fact, in Wordsworth's opinion, the problem is not just London, but that entirety of England is like a stinking swamp, while Englishmen are selfish men, who need to be raised, so that they would become proper human beings once more, rather than some swamp-living creatures, like muskrats.
To sum it up, here are three poets, living in succession, one after another, each with an increasingly pessimistic view of London, and later England as well. When England and London became the hub of the sprawling empire of Britain, it grew not glorious, but pathetic, evil, and eventually simply rotten in the eyes of Swift, Blake, and Wordsworth. Of course, whether or not London and England did become a "fen/ of stagnant waters" can be disputed, and probably is, but the fact remains: the respective attitudes of Swift, Blake, and Wordsworth do compliment each other, and show, how, (at least in some eyes) the city of London (and the rest of England) began to fall apart in moral decay.
Works Cited:
Blake, William. Poems and Prophecies. Ed. Max Plowman, New York: E.P. Dutton andCo. Inc., 1950. 31.
Liu, Yu: Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1999. 97.
Mahoney, John. William Wordsworth: A Poetic Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. 184.
Quintana, Ricardo. The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift. London (England): Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1953. 218-219.
Swift, Jonathan. The Poetical Works of Jonathan Swift Volume I. Ed. Unknown, London: Bell and Daldy Fleet Street, 1866. 93-96.