William Blake's London and Langston Hughes's Harlem (A Dream Deferred)

It is not unusual for poems addressing social issues to carry common themes and sentiments even across considerable chronological gaps. In this regard, the poems London by William Blake and Harlem (A Dream Deferred) by Langston Hughes are not out of the ordinary, despite a century and a half between the creation of the two. Still, despite certain similarities, the specifics of content in the two poems, as well as the format in which they are written, make the chronological gap noticeable.

The contemporary relevance of each poem to its corresponding time period can be seen in the issues they address. Hughes's main emphasis is on the deterioration of the inner-city neighborhoods populated predominantly by racial minorities in the United States following World War II, making New York City's Harlem a specific case in point. Instead of a society of opportunity and prosperity accessible by all, which the end of the Great Depression and the victorious end of WWII appeared to promise, African American residents of the nation's cities see their interests continue to be ignored and racial discrimination to prevail. Hughes's poem is a contemplation of the racial minorities' impending reaction to their "deferred" dream of true equality, but its imagery also can be seen as conveying the squalor in which Harlem residents lived in the early 1950s.

On the other hand, Blake's main emphasis in London is mostly on the detrimental effects of the continuing Industrial Revolution and development of capitalist economy on the common population of the British Empire's capital city. Blake speaks out against greed of the ruling classes, so hungry for money that even the city streets and River Thames are chartered out. He speaks out against a state of affairs in which child labor is condoned in the face of the state religion that speaks of preserving children's innocence. This is reflected in the first two lines of the third stanza, where he talks of "how the chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackening church appalls" (9-10). (Since children were the only ones small enough to fit down a chimney, they usually worked as chimney sweepers.) Blake also speaks out against the government sacrificing the lives of soldiers in unnecessary wars to pursue their expansionist agendas in search for new markets: "And the hapless soldier's sigh Runs in blood down palace-walls" (11-12). In the last stanza, he also talks about the deterioration of the family life due to young women being forced to resort to prostitution to support themselves, resulting in unwanted children and the spread of venereal diseases.

While both poems make extensive use of metaphors, Hughes's poem deals more in the abstract than that of Blake. Hughes does not address specific problems, like Blake does, but the imagery he creates to describe what might happen to the failed promises of inner-city development vividly conveys the author's disgust with what living in Harlem has become. His physical metaphors of a dried-up raisin, festering sore, stinking rotten meat, and crusted-over sweet pastry create a sense of physical deterioration, and the metaphor of a sagging heavy load conveys the sense of physical exhaustion and emotional apathy that overtakes people forced to live in such conditions. Blake, on the other hand, mentions specific problems, and while it is easy to assume that these are not the only problems London of the late-eighteenth century faces, the difference in presentation from Hughes's work is apparent.

In a way, the two poems do "speak" to each other across time because both of them are written at - and about - the time of growing social discontent. Just like the post-World War II America, Britain of the Industrial Revolution held a promise of increased opportunities for prosperity, or at least better living conditions, for more people. Similarly, these dreams have not been realized. Seen in this light, Hughes's poem is the continuation of Blake's poem, indicating what can happen when a dream of better living does not come to fruition. And while Blake's poem is not a prophecy since it concentrates on current events without making a prediction, Hughes's work can be considered a prophecy for his prediction of an "explosion" of social discontent to follow these deteriorating conditions. Civil rights movement of the 1960s can be considered such an explosion.