Charter’d Streets: Lyric and the City

Abstract

Charter’d Streets:Lyric and the City Rosanna Warren (bio) I want to consider ways in which three poets—Blake, Baudelaire, and Hart Crane—responded to the great modern cities in which they lived. Questions of scale and form arise as justly in relation to cities as to poems. How can one express the magnitude of the modern metropolis within the constraints of a lyric poem? And what happens to the traditional love lyric in a city experienced by the solitary individual in a crowd of strangers? Does the experience of the city affect rhythm? Blake imagining London, Baudelaire imagining Paris, Hart Crane imagining New York, all have to rethink poetic form in response to the immense shapes and pulses of the city, as they rethink the possibilities of human connection. Each of these poets composed works more expansive in scale—Blake in The Four Zoas, Baudelaire in the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, Crane in The Bridge—but I shall concentrate on the internal combustion engine of the short lyric, and see how its powers of compression measure up against urban vastness. First, London in 1794, as seen, or more precisely, as heard by Blake. (I have reproduced the eccentric punctuation of the original plate.) London I wander thro’ each charter’d street.Near where the charter’d Thames does flowAnd mark in every face I meetMarks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man.In every Infants cry of fear. [End Page 464] In every voice; in every ban.The mind-forg’d manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cryEvery blackning Church appalls.And the hapless Soldiers sighRuns in blood down Palace walls But most thro’ midnight streets I hearHow the youthful Harlots curseBlasts the new-born Infants tearAnd blights with plagues the Marriage hearse There are many things to notice. One is how four-squarely the poem is built: four quatrains, four sentences, all in tetrameters; four by four by four by four. But against this verse charter, the meter rebels, bucking between iambs and trochees, between rising and falling feet as it opposes itself. The first line is iambic: “I wánd/ er thróugh/ each chár/ ter’d stréet,” while the second starts with a hammering trochee: “Néar where.” Line three carries on with iambs (and an anapest in the third foot): “And márk/ in év/ery fáce/ I méet,” while line four flips again and pounds its argument in trochees: “Márks of/ wéakness,/ márks of/ wóe.” The internal dissension in meter is reflected semantically. Three key words in this apparently simple poem are crammed with potentially contradictory meanings. “Charter,” for instance. The poem plunges us into the geography of streets and river observed by the wandering speaker, but this geography is also legal and conceptual, as suggestive of forms of oppression as of freedoms and powers granted. A charter, from the Latin cartula, little paper, is a written page, an instrument by which a sovereign power grants privileges, rights, or franchise. It can be a deed or a contract, or a license to create a corporation or association. While it may confer freedoms, it also binds, and in Blake’s poem it bespeaks a constraining power, a crushing state authority and multiplication of guilds and rules that create, not freedom, but “marks of [End Page 465] weakness, marks of woe,” and exclude from privilege more than they include. Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man just published in 1791, had accused the city charters of maintaining monopolies and cheating city-dwellers and shopkeepers. Blake’s angry repetition, “charter’d street,” “charter’d Thames,” drives the point home. Like the river, everything else in the poem flows from those charters, including the phoneme AR, picked up and amplified in “mark”: “And mark in every face I meet/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” “Ban” is another word at odds with itself. From Middle English and Old French, of Teutonic origin, “ban” has both positive and sinister connotations. It means a public proclamation, an edict, an order, a summons—as in marriage bans...