Darkside of the Industrial Revolution Exposed in Poems by...

In England during the industrial revolution there was a lot of poverty and pollution, especially in the main towns where the mass unemployment and people often had to go into the work houses. The conditions that they were made to work in were overcrowded. There was no sanitation or anywhere to clean, and there was a large amount of pollution. These all led to diseases among the workers. Some of the jobs that the children were made to do were chimney sweeping or selling matches. Adults had to do bone crushing for fertilisers, working in kitchens and doing the laundry for rich people. At the time there were three poets that all felt strongly about the appalling conditions and they were, William Blake, Michael Thomas Sadler and Percy Bysshe†¦show more content†¦Ã¢â‚¬ËœCharter’d’ is repeated when Blake writes, ‘Near where the chater’d Thames does flow’. Here, Blake is being ironic as a river is a symbol of nature, and therefore it should not be owned, however the rich possessed most of the land so in that way they indirectly owned the rivers as well. In the second verse Blake uses repetition in the words ‘in every’ to stress the suffering that people went through in those times. In the line ‘In every infant’s cry of fear’ Blake is emphasising that in those days suffering began at birth, he is also being ironic because for us it is not normal in England for children to born into suffering but unfortunately in those days it was, even though it shouldn’t of been. He was trying to emphasise this to show that it shouldn’t be happening. In the line ‘In every voice, in every ban’ Blake is trying to get us to understand that in this time of industrial revolution that it wasn’t just a few people that were affected, it was many and that the people who had power and money they thought it was okay to put restrictions on their lives and felt that some of it was their own fault. Blake uses a metaphor in the last line of the second verse in ‘The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.’ This is a metaphor because they are being controlled by the church, shown in the word ‘manacles’ as if they were prisoners of the church. Blake also uses a metaphor in