ブレイクの「ロンドン」 : 流れる「水」、澱む「水」(その1)

概要

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The present essay, the first of a sequential study on relationships between water and human beings, especially in that time of change in England designated as the Industrial Revolution era or the Romantic period, deals with William Blake's "London." Critics have considered this poem the least controversial poem in Songs, for it too clearly describes the realities of the late eighteenth-century metropolis to spur critical controversies. Paying attention, however, to Blake's emendation of the word "dirty" to the much more directly political "charter'd," we realize that he clearly supercedes the typical eighteenth-century mode of description, that is, merely observation, to enter into the mode of revolution, in other words, into the visionary mode. What is pointedly criticized by the visionary narrator of the poem is the alienated relationship between most Londoners and the "charter'd" Thames, parallel to the alienated, depressing, and discriminatory relationships among human beings. In this social situation there are no bountifully flowing waters; waters are flowing only to give profits to those who both give and are given "Charters," never to the large number of alienated, miserable people who must go without. The Thames, then, to the multitudes is never flowing at all, but stagnant.
岐阜大学の論文
1998-09-10