Vocabulary in London

To walk slowly and without a fixed destination, drifting from place to place rather than moving with purpose or urgency.

Officially granted, mapped, and owned under legal documents; here it suggests that even the streets and river have been bought, sold, and controlled by commercial or royal authority.

To notice and take careful note of something; to observe with close, deliberate attention rather than merely glancing.

Deep, heavy sorrow or misery, especially the kind that shows plainly on a person's face or in their behaviour.

An official prohibition or curse; in this poem the word carries both the sense of a legal restriction and a spoken curse that oppresses people.

Mental chains hammered into shape by thought and belief rather than iron; the invisible psychological and social constraints that people accept or impose on themselves and others.

Metal shackles locked around the wrists to restrain a prisoner; used here as a metaphor for any force—mental or social—that binds and enslaves a person.

Unlucky and without any power to change one's fate; deserving pity because circumstances have left a person helpless and without hope.

A child or worker hired to climb inside narrow chimneys and scrape out the soot; in Blake's time these were often very young, poor children forced into dangerous, filthy labour.

Fills with horror and shock; causes a powerful feeling of disgust or moral outrage in whoever witnesses or hears something.

Becoming covered in black soot or moral darkness; the spelling Blake uses suggests both the physical staining of church walls by chimney smoke and the Church's growing moral corruption.

An old word for a woman who sells sexual favours; Blake uses it to point to prostitution as a symptom of poverty and social injustice rather than personal sin.

Ruins or destroys something, the way a disease kills a plant; to infect and corrupt something that might otherwise have been healthy or innocent.

Infects or contaminates with disease; here it suggests that the harlot's curse spreads like a contagion, tainting the newborn and the institution of marriage.

A vehicle that carries a coffin to a funeral; Blake pairs it with 'marriage' to create an image in which marriage itself becomes a kind of death, corrupted beyond any hope of joy.