In London, William Blake portrays a very dark and abysmal image of London. Throughout the poem Blake never mentions a positive scene. The poem seems to deal with the lowest part of society, that part that lives in the poor neighborhoods. The first stanza begins with the speaker wandering around London. Throughout the poem, Blake repeats a word that he used in one line, in the next line. An example of this can be seen in the first two verses. He uses the word charter in the first line without any deep meaning, but the use of the word charted in the next line shows that the Thames was created in such a way that somehow people control where it flows. In the next lines, the speaker talks about all the negative emotions he sees in people on the street, “In every cry of every man,/ In every child's cry of fear,/ In every voice, In every prohibition,/ The handcuffs forged from the mind that I feel." In the final line of the first stanza, the speaker says he feels the handcuffs being forged by the mind. Mind-forged handcuffs are not real. By this I mean that they are created in the minds of those people the speaker sees on the street. Those desperate and depressing thoughts, in turn, imprison the people the speaker sees on the street. When the speaker says that he can feel the "mind-forged handcuffs", he does not mean that he can literally feel the mind-forged handcuffs, but that he can hear the cries of people displaying their mind-forged handcuffs. In the...