Essay: Social Commentary

Social Commentary

The partner poem in this essay is In a London Drawingroom, by George Eliot:

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke.

For view there are the houses opposite

Cutting the sky with one long line of wall

Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch

Monotony of surface & of form

Without a break to hang a guess upon.

No bird can make a shadow as it flies,

For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung

By thickest canvass, where the golden rays

Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering

Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye

Or rest a little on the lap of life.

All hurry on & look upon the ground,

Or glance unmarking at the passers by

The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages

All closed, in multiplied identity.

The world seems one huge prison-house & court

Where men are punished at the slightest cost,

With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.

Explore some of the ways poetry can be used as social commentary

While critics such as Northrop Frye have explored William Blake's poetry from a mythopoeic perspective, others - like Erdman - have presented him as an astute social commentator, critical of the Industrial Revolution, marriage, school, child exploitation, slavery and the Church. George Eliot, like Blake, rejected many aspects of organised religion, but In a London Drawingroom is more concerned with urban life and its monotony. Her realism might be seen as totally different from Blake's imagination, but both authors provided highly relevant critiques of their society. 

William Blake explores the Industrial Revolution in detail through London and its possible partner poem, The Ecchoing Green. He contrasts the urban monotony of the former with the pastoral bliss of the latter: melodic rhyming couplets in The Ecchoing Green compare with a more disjointed ABAB rhyme scheme in London; collective pronouns such as 'Our'' also contrast with the isolated, first-person pronouns of city life. And at the end of The Ecchoing Green, the present participle 'darkening' might imply ongoing urbanisation and its threat to country life. The repetition of 'chart'd' brings with it connotations of constraint, even for the Thames, which should be natural. Blake might have been alluding to his contemporary Thomas Paine, who wrote that 'Every chartered town is an aristocratic monopoly in itself'.

There are several parallels between London and In a London Drawingroom, not least a threat to individuality. Anaphora emphasises 'In every' in Blake's poem, while people are defined by their jobs as chimney-sweepers or soldiers, named in the plural as opposed to the individual 'John' of The Ecchoing Green. Eliot also describes the anonymous 'passers by' in the plural, 'in multiplied identity'. So too do both poets suggest monotony in urban life, repetition and iambic tetrameter evoking this feeling in London while Eliot uses iambic pentameter very strictly for the same effect. She perhaps even includes a reference to this use of metre in the poem's language, her landscape dominated by 'Monotony of surface & of form'. The Industrial Revolution was hugely important for both writers: Blake was writing just after Watt had perfected his steam engine and Arkwright revolutionised the textile industry, while he moved into a house surrounded by fields in Lamberth only to find the area fast becoming an urban slum a decade later. Eliot was obviously writing at an even more advanced stage of industrialisation and mechanisation. Their poetry shows that neither poet supported this change, by expressing all the weariness of city life.

London also contains a biting social critique of marriage. Of course, Blake himself was happily married, but this has not stopped critics suggesting that 'every ban' could be a homophonic pun on marriage 'banns', a theory supported by the final stanza. In this Blake rhymes 'Harlots curse' with 'Marriage hearse', entwining the seemingly opposite worlds of prostitution and marriage. With the arranged marriages and dowries of Blake's time this comparison was perhaps less surprising, and it is underscored by the oxymoronic 'Marriage hearse' (equating marriage to death) and the polysemy of plagues, which could be emotional or venereal. This scathing satire again reveals Blake as a social commentator.

Arguably the main 'target' of his work, however, was the institution behind the institution of marriage. Blake's irreverence towards the Church is seen in poems such as The Garden of Love, in which a prelapsarian Eden falls due to the construction of a chapel, again linking back to the destruction of nature and industrialisation. In the past tense, immediately suggesting something lost, the narrator despairs over the building's unnatural structure imposing itself upon the green. The final two lines show the outcome:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys and desires .

Here Blake lengthens and slows the poem to convey his sadness. The use of the bacchius foot (unstressed, stressed, stressed) is rare for Blake and poetry as a whole, and suggests a dull clumsiness to the priests' rounds. Caesurae, internal rhyme, elongated vowel sounds and an extra two syllables each line (compared with the rest of the poem) all slow the pace, while a switch to the past progressive tense implies that they did not stop. Voltaire wrote that 'Religion, morality put a curb on the power of nature; they cannot destroy it.' The bucolic poetry of the Innocence poems might suggest that Blake agreed with his contemporary, with their simplicity and boundless energy, but The Garden of Love ends with a much more pessimistic commentary.

Like Eliot, Blake mostly confined his criticism of religion to the organised kind. However, The Chimney Sweeper poems might be said to criticise God - if only the Old Testament God which Blake christened Urizen. In the 'Experience' version, a 'little black boy' (again not deigned worthy of a name) is abandoned, its parents 'gone to praise God & his Priest & King/ Who make up a heaven of our misery.' Emphasised by its position at the end of the poem, the genius of this phrase lies in its polysemy, demonstrating what Harding calls the 'immense compression of meaning' in his poetry: 'make up' could simply mean 'comprise', but it could also  be interpreted as 'lie' or 'manufacture', as in the establishment creating a physical heaven for itself by exploiting the working classes. A Marxist interpretation could equally be applied to the ending of the Innocence poem: 'Tho the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm' is not unlike Marx's view of religion as the 'opiate of the people', which dulled the exploitation of the proletariat and prevented them from revolution. Blake's ending could, of course, be interpreted positively, in that Tom feels happy, but after the suffering of the earlier stanzas the ending seems like a parody of didactic nursery rhyme endings. These often ended in rhyming couplets, and the fact that The Chimney Sweeper (innocence) concludes with an eye rhyme ('warm' and 'harm') also suggests disappointment, perhaps saying that Tom's hardships have only been solved superficially - that the problem remains beneath the surface of the page.

Blake was similarly critical of school. His father, seeing his headstrong attitude from an early age, decided not to send his son to school. The School Boy possibly demonstrates why, with Blake's argument that the 'little ones' spend the day 'under a cruel eye outworn'. Mentioning their small size creates pathos, while also highlighting the ridiculousness of such totalitarian methods being used to control mere children. A 'cruel eye outworn' is an Orwellian metaphor, perhaps an allusion to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, invented the decade before Blake wrote the poem. This was a type of circular building in which a central guard could watch over all inmates without them knowing if they were being watched. It was designed, he said, for prisons, factories - and schools. Whether Blake was referring to it or not, Bentham's panopticon seems emblematic of everything he hated, yet another example of 'mind-forg'd manacles'. This metaphor is doubly effective  because of its multiple meanings, with 'forg'd' implying shaped out of metal (another allusion to the Industrial Revolution?) and counterfeit material simultaneously. 

The manacles of slavery were the most serious. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was only formed in 1787, but Blake was typically at the forefront of social change. Exactly like In a London Drawingroom but unlike most of the Songs, The Little Black Boy is written in iambic pentameter, arguably immediately conveying the seriousness of the topic. Although it does not contain the outright second-person accusations of The Chimney Sweeper, Blake still implicates the reader by addressing them from the child's point of view. Interestingly, the two stanzas from the child are symmetrically placed at the start and end of the poem. It is as if Blake is using structure to suggest that there is symmetry in the content too - there is little difference between the two children. If there is a difference, it is that the English boy needs to be shaded from the heat until he can bear to stand God's power, perhaps implying that he is further from God. In any case, the white and black of the poem's first half have been transmuted into silver and gold by the end: does this alchemy allude to God's spiritual riches? Or does it in act, as a cynic might ask, refer instead to to the slave trade and the exploitation of innocence?

It would not be a new theme for Blake, Bronowski wrote that his political beliefs 'ripple under the surface' of his poetry and in many cases they do, with, for example, the trochaic metre and burning eyes of The Tyger often linked to the revolutionary march and incendiary spirit of the French Revolution. But in many cases his beliefs are not hidden as extended metaphors, 'under the surface', but are extraordinarily clear. Whether it was his bleak description of London, which George Eliot later mirrored, or little Tom Dacre evoking pathos with his hair, Blake knew that his poetry was a tool for social commentary, and he did not hesitate to attack the industrialisation, organised religion or the horrific child exploitation of the late eighteenth century.