A Poem Where Babies Cry, Prostitutes Curse, and Even the Thames Has Morally Checked Out
ABS Believes:
Blake didn’t just walk through London—he did a mental autopsy on its conscience.
An unreal city doesn’t need CGI—it just needs indifference, smog, and well-dressed despair.
Blake the Visionary: Prophet in a Sewer-Cloaked City
William Blake was that guy who saw angels in trees and political decay in chimney smoke. In London, he doesn’t paint—he scalds. This poem walks the streets not as a tourist but as a disgusted local with x-ray vision for injustice.
Blake sees everything. Especially the things no one wants to admit.
Stanza One: The Street View That Google Would Censor
“I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow…”
Yes. Chartered. Twice. That means legally owned, mapped, monetized—basically, gentrified.
Even the river has been privatized. The Thames isn’t a flowing symbol of nature. It’s a tired, overworked water body choking on contracts and moral debris.
“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”
Everybody’s face is branded like an emotional invoice. Blake doesn’t need therapy. He just needs a new postal code.
Stanza Two: Welcome to the Sigh Symphony
“In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear…”
Note the repetition. Blake is building a bleak choir—everyone’s crying, but nobody’s listening. It’s surround-sound sorrow.
“In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.”
Mind-forged manacles. That’s the poetic way of saying: we’re all shackled by invisible ideas. Laws, norms, guilt, shame, moral policing, and 9-to-5 jobs.
These aren’t chains you can cut. They’re beliefs soldered into your neurons.
Stanza Three: The Chimney Sweep’s Soot-Stained Psalms
“How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls…”
And there it is: the blackened church. Physically by smoke, metaphorically by hypocrisy.
Blake points his poetic pitchfork at the institution meant to protect the poor—and finds it conveniently looking the other way while children clean chimneys and inhale soot for salvation.
“And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.”
Translation: Soldiers die while royalty paints. The sigh isn’t just weary—it’s political. And Blake’s not subtle: the palace walls are metaphorically bleeding while the elite sip tea.
Stanza Four: Prostitution and Poetic Wrath
“But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse…”
This isn’t Shakespeare’s Juliet whispering sweet nothings. This is a teenager forced into prostitution, cursing the system that shoved her there.
“Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”
Yes. Marriage hearse. A wedding that dies before it lives. Because the system is so broken that even sacred institutions smell like decay.
Unreal Cities and Echoes Across Time
T.S. Eliot, more than a century later, calls London the “Unreal City” in The Waste Land. But Blake said it first—he just didn’t use the phrase. Eliot borrowed it from Dante’s Inferno (because if anyone knew cities were hell, it was Dante).
Modern parallel?
Today’s unreal cities include:
Mumbai, where Bentley showrooms blink across the street from blue plastic roofs.
Delhi, where AQI levels kill romance before winter does.
Bengaluru, where you can buy crypto faster than you can cross a pothole.
Kolkata, where nostalgia bleeds into bureaucracy like Blakean ink on faded parchment.
These are cities that function—but don’t feel. Blake would have written London 2.0 and Eliot would’ve nodded while updating his Waste Land to include metro rails and broken marriages at food courts.
Witty Decay & ABS Diagnosis
“Chartered street… chartered Thames…”
When capitalism colonizes geography and still asks for applause.
“Marks of weakness, marks of woe…”
Urban skincare, 1794 edition.
“Mind-forged manacles…”
Now available in Instagram filters and political ideologies.
“Marriage hearse…”
A Blakean Valentine’s Day card waiting to happen.
Why This Poem Still Smells Like Burning Coal and Broken Dreams
Because cities still trap souls between alleys and ambitions.
Because moral decay never goes out of fashion—it just rebrands.
Because no CCTV can capture the things Blake saw.
And because London is not just a place—it’s a state of silent, structured suffering.
The Literary Scholar folds the scroll in a foggy alley, where lamplight flickers over old verses and new sins, and the city keeps walking like nothing’s wrong.
Signed,
The Literary Scholar
Where soot-stained truths get wrapped in rhyme
Where manacles rust, but metaphors still scream
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