suggest emotions and feelings of pain, misery, and the shedding of tears through these spoken sounds of distress. The use of these end-rhyming words also reflects onomatopoeia in the way in which the vowel sounds echo and indicate their meanings, thus suggesting the morbid sense of the subject. The sound of the word cry has a lot of power and significance in this poem. Not only does it suggest the emotions and moods felt by society, but it also alerts the reader to pay close attention to the way the poem sounds. The reoccurrence of the word cry--adjoined with Blakes use of other gloomy words such as fear (6), appalls (10), sigh (11), and tear (15)--pushes forward to form the readers recognition that the sound strongly echoes the theme in nearly every line of the poem.The poems predominant meter is trochaic tetrameter, which also reinforces its meaning and tone. Each line contains three stressed and unstressed syllables that form a regular, predictable rhythm throughout the first three quatrains. The last stanza, an iambic tetrameter, breaks this regular pattern. This quatrain, though similar in structure and rhyme, shifts the poem from a falling to a rising meter, which adds to the poems dramatic ending by echoing the citizens inability to defy the governments regular and standard arrangement. The prevailing groupings of intervals between varied stresses in the poem are end-stopped lines. However, Blake added some run-on, or enjambed, lines to give variation to the sounds and to counterpoint the poems metric pattern against its syntactic units. These enjambed lines (3, 9, 11, 13, 14) create tension and complex interplay in the poems sounds, which in turn reflects the intricate relationship between society and politics in London during this time. Blakes use of language, figures of speech, symbols, and images work together to illustrate a significant portrayal of the dark image of London life by the speaker. The blackning Chur...
