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Saturday, October 06, 2007
Blake’s Charter
I wander thro each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hearHow the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
Why ‘chartered’?
The usual way to read this, I suppose, is that chartered means something like ‘measured’, ‘delimited’, ‘restricted’. It’s not immediately clear why, though. Maybe Blake is thinking of charted, in the sense of mapped (but surely mapping describes rather than limits? An accurate map is an instrument of knowledge, not oppression, no?). Or perhaps Blake means ‘governed by Charter’, which is to say [in the words of the OED] governed by ‘a written document delivered by the sovereign or legislature’. The notion of London as strangulated by oppressive legislation, the enactments of tyrannical powers of the state, certainly fits with the tone and content of the rest of the poem.
But wait a moment: charters are not restrictive. They are, on the contrary, emancipatory or enabling proclamations. The full OED definition is ‘‘a written document delivered by the sovereign or legislature: (a) granting privileges to, or recognising the rights of, the people … (b) granting pardons … (c) creating or incorporating a borough, university, company or other corporation’. The most famous Charter in British history, after all, is the Great Charter, the Magna Carta, which splendid document limited the powers of the monarch and enshrined the rights of the monarch’s subjects. Wouldn’t a political radical, like Blake, be minded to think charters, on the whole, good things, rather than bad? So why chartered streets and river, like that’s the cause of the misery of ordinary Londoners?
Look at the old man there in the illustration; long white beard, crutches, blue coat. Critics sometimes argue that this figure is Urizen, the ‘Old-Testament God’ embodiment of restriction and tyranny from Blake’s personal mythology. The beard is right, certainly; and although Urizen, in Blake’s art, is usually naked or wearing a white robe, sometimes, as here, he is portrayed in blue (he is, in a Blakean sense, the sky-god of old mythology, the horizon (=urizen) that surrounds and constrains thought, so there’s a level on which blue is appropriate). The old geezer in the ‘London’ illustration also looks a little like Los, who for Blake embodies the creative imagination (in the Book of Los it’s his desire to give form to a chaotic universe that leads to the Creation), a portion, or ‘zoa’, of the primal man Albion, just like Urizen. In Blake’s myth, Los becomes dominated by his counterpart Urizen, and the frontispiece to The Book of Los shows him dressed in blue, white bearded and trapped in a very constrictive-looking cave.
At any rate, in the illustration to ‘London’ this aged bluecoat is being lead through the grimly bricky streets of, we assume, London by a sprightly young fellow. This chap wears green; a colour of vegetative fertility and growth appropriate to his youth. London, it seems in the poem, has grown old and arthritic; but there is hope for him insofar as is embodied by the rejuvenating energy of green youth. The lower half of the image shows that same youth warming himself at a fire—in Blake’s mythology fire is almost always a good thing, the energising and active principle of imagination. On the other hand, this fire seems to be productive of a great deal of smoke, rather than much heat or light; but perhaps all that’s meant by that is that the fires of active imaginative energy are being stifled. Something tyrannical has hold of London, the poem tells us; something restrictive, strangulating, oppressive; the words tell us the grisly consequences of this, the bloodshed and hatred. The image portrays Blake’s personal embodiment of oppressive tyranny, dominating the upper portion of the page. That there’s hope is perhaps hinted at in the green boy.
So far, so straightforward. My problem is that the two main senses of ‘chartered’ offered by explicators don’t match terribly well the undeniable sense of oppression and misery that is the poem’s subject.
Now, I think that Blake has in mind the Magna Carta, amongst other things, when he writes this poem. The thing is that, although some radicals proposed the reformation of the Houses of Parliament to bring them more into line with what they took to be the chartered rights and liberties of ordinary people enshrined in the Magna Carta, there were others who took exactly the opposite line. Take, for instance, John Cartwright, a radical and contemporary of Blake’s. He made the Magna Carta one of the focuses of his attack:
Although there was a popular movement to resist the sovereignty of Parliament based on The Charter, others thought that too much was claimed for the Charter. Cartwright pointed out in 1774 that Magna Carta could not have existed unless there was a firm constitution beforehand. He went even further later and claimed that the Charter was not part of the constitution, but merely a codification of the constitution that existed at the time. Cartwright went on to suggest that there should be a new Magna Carta based on equality and rights for all, not just for landed persons. People like Cartwright were showing that the rights granted by the Charter were out of pace with the changes that had happened in the intervening six centuries.
(That’s from wikipedia, but actually it’s the 11th ed. of the Encyclopedia Britannica purloined and thinly adapted.) In other words, the Magna Carta is too old, too ancient, too white-bearded and bent-over, to be of use to radical political aims. Which is to say, the Magna Carta is like the old man in Blake’s illustration. A new charter is needed, a young green-clothed, fire-burning, vigorous Charter to guarantee the rights that are presently denied by the mind-forg’d manacles, the violence of the hapless Soldiers, and the rest.
The original Magna Carta hasn’t survived, but four contemporary 13th-century copies have. The most famous of these is the so-called Burnt Copy; probably the copy sent to the Cinque Ports. It got singed in a fire in Dover Castle, and was afterwards moved to the British Library. It is the only copy to have retained its seal. Now, I can’t find evidence that Blake actually set eyes on it (although it was reproduced, in the eighteenth-century). He certainly might have seen it, or at the very least an engraving of it. And here it is. I invite you to look at it, and then look again at the visual design of London.
A couple of things strike me. The first is that the bulb-shaped mass of fire on the right-side of Blake’s image looks like an inverted mirror-image of the middle portion of fire damage on the Magna Carta (right-for-left in the mirror-logic of Blake’s engraving). Turn that burn damage shape through 180 degrees and mirror-flip it about, and it fits quite closely over the boy-and-fire section of Blake’s design, or so it seems to me—I can see the fire-shape, and appended to it the crouching boy. The resemblance seems to me stronger in part because the pattern is, as is often in Blake’s work, embedded in lines of writing; as with the Magna Carta. See that weird hook-shaped squiggle with which Blake fills in the space between the final stanza and the right margin? Does that look to you like a mirror-image of the hook-like tear depending from the topmost patch of Magna Carta burn-damage? Does that bottom patch of fire damage look like an inverted version of the shape make by the bluecoat’s white head and beard?
Then again: look at the tail that grows from the top of the L in Blake’s LONDON, and that winds its way down the left margin, along the bottom and culminates in that leonine swish in the bottom right corner. Look at the right-to-left undulations of the cord holding the seal on the Magna Carta. They don’t look to you like mirror images of one another?
Blake’s page is half picture and half words, where the Magna Carta is all words; but nevertheless I find myself wondering whether by embedding a pictoral fire in the midst of those words Blake isn’t alluding to the fire-damage that partially destroyed the original Charter; and by having the young embodiment of revolutionary optimism warming his hands at that fire, if he isn’t providing us with an ironic gloss on the antiquated document: burn it, he is saying; warm yourselves from its destruction.
So what I’m proposing, tentatively, is that the Magna Carta acted as a sort of visual prompt for Blake’s design; or rather than Blake’s design for ‘London’ (the town in the heart of which the burnt copy of the Magna Carta is held) functions as a sort of sly visual gloss upon or pastiche of the Magna Carta. There’s more. Start again:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
What does charter actually mean? Well, it means paper. (OED: ‘Charter. [ME . chartre, a. OF. chartre, ONF. cartre (for *cartle):—L. cartula, charter, lit. small paper or writing, dim. Of carta, charta paper. Cf. CHAPTER] Lit. a leaf of paper.’) What about marks, whether of weakness or of woe? What does ‘marks’ mean? A mark is ‘a sign’; ‘a device, stamp, seal, label, brand, inscription, written character of the like’ [OED]. Marks are, amongst other things, writing.
I look again at Blake’s image, and notice as if for the first time that the actual words of the poem, though in a literal sense written upon paper (the paper onto which Blake printed his poem) are, in terms of visual logic, written upon nothing so substantial. They are written upon smoke.
Indeed, one way of reading the poem is to note its pointed lack of writing; of, we might say, anything so effective as a written-down people’s charter. Instead words are spoken, unfixed: the ‘cry of every Man’, and ‘Infants cry of fear’, and ‘the Chimney-sweepers cry’; alongside ‘the hapless Soldiers sigh’ and the ‘youthful Harlots curse’. It’s all oral. In a sense, we might say, the poem is telling us that words need to be written on more than air (or smoke); they need actually to be set down on paper (as Blake does with his words). They need to be chartered.
In other words, I’m suggesting that those first two uses of the word ‘chartered’ in the description of London’s streets (where the Magna Carta is now kept) and the river Thames (on whose banks the original Magna Carta was signed) is ironic. What’s wrong with the chartered streets of London is that they are not chartered enough … that the charter which binds them is old and broken-down; that a new charter is necessary. A people’s charter. It’s not that the Magna Carta was inherent tyrannical; like Los, it was an act of imaginative creativity aimed at liberty; but it has become entangled with Urizenic restrictiveness and oppression. That’s why it must be lead from the scene by something new; and that’s why Blake’s visual representation of it combines Los and Urizen in one.
Comments
Surely Blake intends a various lot by inference of his poetic phrasing, and certainly one salient inference might be that the results of fine words always depend upon their implementation, as Noam Chomsky notes below in this recent interview:
A Revolution is Just Below the Surface
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Eva Golinger
EVA: I read a quote of yours which said power is always illegitimate unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So in Venezuela right now we are in the process of Constitutional reform. And within that reform the People’s Power is going to gain Constitutional rank, above in fact all the other state powers, the executive, legislative and judicial powers, and in Venezuela we also have the electoral and the citizen’s power. Would this be an example of power becoming legitimate? A people’s power? And could this change the way power is viewed? And change the face of Latin America considering that the Bolivarian Revolution is having such an influence over other countries in the region?
CHOMSKY: Your word, the word “could”, is the right word. Yes it “could” , but it depends how it is implemented. In principle it seems to be a very powerful and persuasive conception, but everything always depends on implementation. If there is really authentic popular participation in the decision-making and the free association of communities, yeah, that could be tremendously important. In fact that’s essentially the traditional anarchist ideal. That’s what was realized the only time for about a year in Spain in 1936 before it was crushed by outside forces, in fact all outside forces, Stalinst Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussilini’s fascism and the Western democracies cooperated in crushing it. They were all afraid of it. But that was something like what you are describing, and if it can function and survive and really disperse power down to participants and their communities, it could be extremely important.
EVA: Do you think it’s just an idealist illusion or can it really be manifested?
CHOMSKY: I think it can. It’s usually crushed by outside force because it’s considered so dangerous…
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=13946
I think Adam offers a fine reading of Blake’s poem and I’d like give it a go as I don’t get to write on Romantics much. (I may sound a little dated in my instance on the glyphic focus of the opening, but I do think it ties the poem to material concerns--the “world” as is suggested by the blue and green of the figures)
“chartered” because written? Or written on? Perhaps a nation that creates poverty and moves the author to write about the poor? To mark marks? Or, rather, “To mark in every face I meet / Marks. . .” the shift from “mark” to “cry” is ironic, because it is the subject and not the medium that has changes--the poor are given voices, but in writing. The author’s phrase “mind-forged manacles” suggests solipsism as the black of the chimney sweep becomes a church that grows pale as a soldier dies in a palace. This strikes me as a suggestion of a situation upon which Kamau Brathwaite comments in “Hereroes” from Sun Poem--the poor as their interests are “voiced” among the competing interests of Church, Military Power, and Politics. Is Blake suggesting the complex social arrangements that set the conditions for poverty as Brathwaite later will? And for Blake are these conditions gender specific as well?
When Blake shifts from chimney sweep to a harlot he also shifts from an image of masculine working poverty to degraded female “workers"--young prostitutes who are silenced and disdained rather than helped because they are outside the role of mother and wife. . .but then that might be another meaning of “chartered"--proverbial red light districts and such. . .what was Blake’s relation to Grub Street?
I’ve just finished teaching this poem to my freshmen. Thanks for the intriguing reading, Adam. I have read “charter’d” in the poem as indicating the implementation of power, whether to grant freedom or restrict it. In the context of phrases like “mind-forged manacles” this makes sense, I think. Also, the context of the other poems in the Songs is important, especially the two Chimney Sweeper pieces, which make direct reference to King & Priest, etc., figures who “charter” the lives of London’s citizens. (See also “The Garden of Love” in opposition to ‘The Echoing Green.” I don’t think the charter’d / charted reading precludes your Magna Carta reading, necessarily, though I’m not convinced by the image of the burned out spot in the Magna Carta--looks like South America to me.
Milton, jd, thank you. It does look a little like South America, I agree. I suppose I’d say that its less the (at best arguable) specific resemblance between the shapes in the Magna Carta and the shapes in Blake’s design; it’s more that, in the former, those shapes were caused by fire burning the paper (the charter), and in Blake’s image fire is portrayed right there, burning on the paper.
Adam, in the first version ‘chartered’ is ‘dirty’ - it’s an interesting revision. I assume you’re familiar with E.P. Thompson’s book on Blake. Anyway, here’s what he says about ‘chartered’:
“The first important change is from “dirty” to “charter’d.” Another fragment in the notebook helps to define this alteration:
Why should I care for the men of thames
Or the cheating waves of charter’d streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into my ear
Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me
I was born a slave but I go to be free [3]
Thus “charter’d” arose in Blake’s mind in association with “cheating” and with the “little blasts of fear” of the “hireling.” The second association is an obvious political allusion. To reformers the corrupt political system was a refuge for hirelings: indeed, Dr. Johnson had defined in his dictionary a “pension” as “In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.” David Erdman is undoubtedly right that the “little blasts of fear” suggest the proclamations, the Paine-burnings and the political repressions of the State and of Reeves’ Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers which dominated the year in which these poems were written. [4] In the revised version of “Thames” Blake introduces the paradox which was continually to be in the mouths of radicals and factory reformers in the next fifty years: the slavery of the English poor. And he points also ("I was born a slave but I go to be free") to the first wave of emigration of reformers from the attention of Church-and-King mobs or hirelings.
But “charter’d” is more particularly associated with “cheating.” It is clearly a word to be associated with commerce: one might think of the Chartered Companies which, increasingly drained of function, were bastions of privilege within the government of the city. Or, again, one might think of the monopolistic privileges of the East India Company, whose ships were so prominent in the commerce of the Thames, which applied in 1793 for twenty-years’ renewal of its charter, and which was under bitter attack in the reformers’ press.’