The poem I went with was “London” by William Blake. What drew me to this poem was that William Blake actually talks about a society we live in today. In the first stanza, the poem reads “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, “and in the picture we can see the old man is being guided by someone down a street because he is not familiar with the area which is why he uses the word wander in the line, fits perfectly with the picture. As he keeps walking, he looks around and sorrow follows. He talks about manacles which is a metal band or a chain that keeps someone tied down. He says in the second stanza “The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” and I think he means that if people stop following the same hard routine, they fear they might not have a successful or a comfortable future and that they might be destroyed, and in the picture above we can see a man trying to put out fire. This to me seems like that the man thinks if he keeps on the manacles tied onto him by society, only then will he be able to put out that fire and continue to live by. This poem is a part of songs of experience because throughout every stanza, he talks about a society when everywhere he looks, he sees the innocence of men, women and children being destroyed right before his eyes, the old man in the picture has closed eyes and the guy is looking at him wondering if he is exhausted from all the walking but little does he know that the old man has been withered down and can’t look into the place any further.
Zain, It’s interesting to me that Blake’s poem seems to you to describe our own society. That is very powerful. I agree that the idea of “mind-forged manacles” is very important here. The constraints he is describing, as you suggest, are not physical and they don’t come from outside of us; he is suggesting that there is a way in which we are imprisoning or constraining ourselves in our modern, urban lives.