AQA Power & Conflict Poetry - London

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  • Created by: lilyhw
  • Created on: 18-03-20 17:24
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  • London - William Blake
    • Key Themes
      • Power of humans
      • Loss and absence
      • Negative emotions - anger
      • individual experiences
    • Form & Structure
      • Dramatic monologue and 4 line quatrains
        • Could maybe mean that the message Blake was trying to get across was that even things that look and sound simple, have a complex underbelly
      • Rhyme scheme is fairly simple, ABAB
        • adds to idea of simple things being more complex than meets the eye
          • consistency of theme, rhyme and repetition
      • Blake used snapshots of some elements of London in each quatrain to really represent how bad it got
        • narrator represents relentless images of downtrodden, deprived people.
    • Language features
      • rhetoric terms- used by narrator to persuade the reader about his point of view
      • sensory use - poem includes the depressing sights and sounds
        • first stanza is about what he SEES, second about what he HEARS and the last 2 stanzas combine the VISUAL and AURAL
      • contrasts - used to show how everything is affected and nothing remains pure or innocent
    • context
      • through his poetry, Blake wanted to awaken in people what's happening in London - How the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer
      • Blake was a dissenter ( arrested for going against the king/queen)
      • He had a spiritual side- believed in the connection between life & after life
    • Key quotations
      • "mind-forged manacles"
        • shows how people are trapped by them. "mind-forged" suggests eternity as forging was a job where people made shackles and cuffs that were hard to break.
        • shows that people aren't able to surpass 'expectations of their class' due to mental restrictions,
        • that their society metaphorically imprisons them with the pressures and ideas of society under scrutiny
      • "marks of weakness, marks of woe"
        • Sets up melancholy tone to the poem. syntactic parallelism shows how it's everywhere
      • "Black'ning church appalls"
        • represents loss of innocence. How Blake criticises the church for lack of intervention

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