The first time I read William Jay Smith's "London" it didn't strike me as remarkable, but I woke up next morning with the first two lines circling in my head. It feels like a sign when my mind starts memorizing things on its own.
So I went back and read it again, and that's when I decided to memorize the whole thing. It's a pretty simple poem with a straightforward structure that makes for easy recall, but as I took it in line by line, it's a pretty powerful poem as well.
"London" is rife with religious themes and inversion—destruction as judgement, the anti-paradise, myths and fate; it's almost medieval in its darkness. The repetition and odd meter give me Gregorian chant or Greek chorus vibes, channeling doom. The doom is fateful, inescapable; the city apparently exists in some kind of post-apocalypse, but is facing its final, immediate end.
The first stanza is an overture to the piece, beginning with a ghostly harbinger and a warning, that both echoes the Lord's Prayer and Weird Sisters of Macbeth.
...Give us this day our daily bread,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil;
For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
The Weird Sisters themselves (of Double, double / toil and trouble / fire burn and cauldron bubble fame) serve to warn from, while instigating destruction. Straddling the line between temporal and spiritual, the Sisters present a temptation phrased in cautionary language—which means they’re messengers of fate, but also directing it by suggestion. “You’re going to be king” is a pretty seductive prophecy.
The tone of the whole poem conveys the sense of desperate hopelessness: “all are lost.” Smith is a master of double meaning—“lost” can be both the end of hope and the darkness of the soul; juxtaposed with Banquo’s ghost, the theme of temptation and falling from grace becomes that much more obvious. Banquo, as Macbeth’s foil, is uneasy with the Sisters’ words and resists the reward they offer:
“But ‘tis strange;
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence.” (Macbeth, Act 1 Scene III, lines 122-126)
Banquo’s caution is his doom; but of course Macbeth’s reckless, heady greed becomes his. Banquo’s ghost presages earthly vengeance for the terrified usurper, and no quiet rest for his soul.
Rest for the soul is what salvation is to purchase: redemption from sin and ultimately man’s fallen state. But “the ribs that rose and fell were barrel staves,” lifeless wood, stark and bleached on the shore. These aren’t the ribs formed from dust and made man; these aren’t the ribs that became woman; and Adam isn’t sleeping by the River of Life in the flourishing garden, but dead by a river that only wants more.
The river is the main player in this poem. It is terrible in its presence, a force as fearful and potent as evil, and it takes. The river is Fate. There is no resisting it or swimming against it or undoing the damage it brings. It is chaos, disguised as direction.
The river is also “like a serpent”. Sinuous and sly, it infiltrates and poisons—mixing the water and sky, confusing, muddying, turning the world upside down. In the Biblical narrative, Satan disguised as a serpent came to Eve in the garden and promised great things: to know like God. All she had to do was one small act of disobedience, to take one fruit from the one tree God had forbidden. “But you will not die, as God promised,” the serpent said; “instead, you will know good and evil. Take and eat!”
And the people ate, and they fell from grace. Not only did their souls die, they would no longer live forever, because good gifts from an evil hand lead to destruction. “Honest trifles” often do “betray ’s in deepest consequence.”
On the night of the king’s murder, Banquo—sensing that something is rotten in the state of Denmark a disturbance in the force just standing in the back, sensing something—says, “There’s husbandry in heaven; their candles are all out” (Act II, scene 1, 4-5). The sky is dark and quiet, before the storm breaks. “It will be rain tonight” (Act III, scene 3, 16).
The whole setting here is dull and grim, some kind of futuristic medievalism, and using Macbeth for atmospheric context colors the poem with murder and cruelty and greed—and a certain hopelessness. With so many undertones of religion throughout the poem, does Smith use “the quiet sky” to suggest an absence of God? Here he is a silent divinity, at best, but one who perhaps never existed outside the potency of this dark river.
The insidious water, the serpent, brings ultimate destruction. From temptation to the final fall, from the weird sisters to the bloody hands, Banquo’s ghost promised and now Birnam comes to Dunsinane. I love this word picture, “Leaves from Birnam Wood were on the wind”: there is something so evocative about it. Maybe it’s the Swinburnian alliteration. Maybe because it reminds me, oddly enough, of the end of The Great Gatsby (‘leaves on the wind’ lines always make me think of autumn) where Nick says that “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” There’s also that beautiful—I’m sorry, tangent here—beautiful passage after the description of what could have been “a night scene by El Greco”:
“After Gatsby’s death, the east was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air, and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line, I decided to come back home.”
Not at all am I saying the two are related, but it’s interesting that Fitzgerald would use Fall as a time of renewal, when life starts all over (and Nick is coming home and beginning fresh); but it lives in the context of death and ending and the close of the season. The brittle leaves of Birnam Wood were in the air, and they presaged the end. Also, it’s yet another definition of the word “fall”.
Fate has come to destroy with what it gives. It’s a continued inversion of biblical themes, where the “living water” (a symbolic name for Jesus) and the “river of life” (from the book of Revelation’s New Jerusalem) now become the water of death. In Revelation, the saints stand around God’s throne and sing “Holy, holy, holy” in a praise song for their redemption. Here it is a shriek of terror as an unforgiving force begins to consume them.
Throughout Macbeth, Banquo serves as the conscience, a constant reminder of doom and consequences, but he also has a sort of triumph over death. Whether his ghost actually returns or that’s Macbeth’s personal conscience driving him crazy, Macbeth killed but cannot get rid of Banquo’s nagging presence. There’s an interesting religious parallel (since we’re looking for those): Jesus died and then rose, although his promise was hope and Banquo’s is despair.
Unless you think I’m taking this too far, notice Macbeth’s language in Act IV, scene 4, 138: he refers to the ghost as “blood-boltered Banquo”. He is literally crowned with blood, and this “crown doth sear my eyeballs” (128). In conjunction with all the other Christian themes, it’s a remarkable coincidence that Christ’s death followed his own crown of thorns and blood. So we can back-interpret that Christ’s resurrection as a symbol of life is again subversively paralleled with Banquo’s half-return as a warning and a curse.
His presence as the ghost at the feast is the unpleasant past linked to a worse future, the writing—since we’re still talking biblical references!—on the wall. The figurative leaves from Birnam Wood, the wind as change, are excellent foreshadowing; the ghost has passed by and blighted the ribs of man. Life and hope are wrecked in the overturned garden. There is falling from life to death, and the hungry waves come closer, and the stars begin to go out.
The final verse may be my favorite, it is so powerful and ties all the threads tightly together. The jewels of Banquo’s crown, like Christ’s sweated drops of blood in the garden, have fallen—the candles of heaven are darkened.
In C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, there is a (very very long) passage describing the end of the world (that I’m going to reproduce here with no shame for the extra homework). When I was inhaling the Chronicles of Narnia at 10, this was a striking image for me that resurfaced when I was thinking about the stars “disappear[ing] above the city”:
Then the great giant raised a horn to his mouth. They could see this by the change of the black shape he made against the stars. After that—quite a bit later, because sound travels so slowly—they heard the sound of the horn: high and terrible, yet of a strange, deadly beauty.
Immediately the sky became full of shooting stars. Even one shooting star is a fine thing to see; but these were dozens, and then scores, and then hundreds, till it was like silver rain: and it went on and on. And when it had gone on for some while, one or two of them began to think that there was another dark shape against the sky as well as the giant's. It was in a different place, right overhead, up in the very roof of the sky as you might call it. ‘Perhaps it is a cloud,’ thought Edmund. At any rate, there were no stars there: just blackness. But all around, the downpour of stars went on. And then the starless patch began to grow, spreading further and further out from the centre of the sky. And presently a quarter of the whole sky was black, and then a half, and at last the rain of shooting stars was going on only low down near the horizon.
With a thrill of wonder (and there was some terror in it too) they all suddenly realized what was happening. The spreading blackness was not a cloud at all: it was simply emptiness. The black part of the sky was the part in which there were no stars left. All the stars were falling: Aslan had called them home.
Of course, in the context of Narnia, this is a bittersweet thing because while the old world is ending, there is the promise of one new and better.
That is absolutely not the case here. Nothing is getting better. Everything is only getting worse.
London Bridge is falling, falling, falling,
Scaled, and crossed.
The stars are gone, the singers are silenced. Perhaps the world ends here. The Sisters, Banquo, the singers, the people—maybe they accurately predicted the end, but it’s still the end! Being right didn’t save any of them.
The Bridge falls, in an eerie echo of the nursery rhyme. … London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down… Access to the city is now cut off. –Looking at a map of London, of course it only borders the river, but if that river were a snake, and that snake had “coiled upon each eye” around it (describing how it turns upon itself? Or circling back like the London Eye? See what I mean, the layers), the city would be stranded by the encircling snake.
When the bridge falls, the river becomes the ruler. The bridge is “scaled”: a verb which here means an enemy action, climbing over, breaking through the defenses—but also, and more obviously, describes a snake. And the bridge is “crossed”: the city is infiltrated. This is subtle wordplay as well, since Christ died on the cross, but this ends with death; not resurrection.
There is a distinct lack of actors in this poem: the singers narrate, the people cry, but nobody does anything beyond wail in the dark. Only the river “moves among them”. There is no power for good, only evil, and man’s fall is synonymous with man’s creation (if we take the rising and falling barrel staves to be the moment of his birth: it’s also the moment we realize he is dead). The crown—“of life,” the reward for tribulation, or in Macbeth’s case murder—brings and is a mark of death, and the cross that was supposed to bring redemption is a sign of the bitter end.
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I really loved this poem when I started writing about it months ago, but it’s been a long summer and I’m kind of over it. Posting for practice more than anything else. It spoke to me where I was mentally then, and I’m somewhere else now.
…Reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot so maybe that’s not exactly a great place. My mama always told me I was special.
