the crimes of London. The curse could be seen in two ways, it could be that she is literally swearing but it could also mean that the unhappy girl is cursing or blaming the hard, cold world she is living in.the most powerful use of imagery in this poem to me is the oxymoron, "blights with sighs the marriage hearse," and image in which opposites collide with one another. A hearse, a vehicle for carrying the dead to the grave being used for marriage. Sighs are also more likely to be heard at funerals than marriages, but here Blake mixes the two together. At one level it could be that Blake is arguing that it is wrong for prostitution to exist in the same society as a respectable legal marriage. At another it could be that he is suggesting that men do go to prostitutes where marriage is cold and unloving, or where sexually repressed. Yet, at another level , blight can mean "diseased," and in the eighteenth century STDs were common, and could be fatal. The hearse could be a real one. In whatever context it was written it is a particularly strong line which symbolises the death or wrong doing in industrial London.Blake uses much imagery of darkened things to stress how bleak and gloomy life is, with no light at the end of the tunnel.The rhythm of the poem is very slow and pounding which emphasises the darkness of London and the pace of London at the time. The punctuation in the poem increases the slowness, which enhances the effect of being trapped in a world and there being no way to escape. The rhyme scheme is constant throughout the poem which adds to the constant pounding which is also achieved through Blakes use of iambic pentameter. His repetition of the word "every" in the second stanza seems to stress the pounding of the poem further.Blakes use of imagery, repetition, punctuation and rhyme all work together to produce a powerful work of art in my eyes. It shows how times really were in London and how it was impossible t...
