Blake walks the «charter'd» streets — even the river is chartered, bought — of a London where in every face he sees marks of weakness and of woe. In every voice, in every ban, he hears the «mind-forged manacles»: chains not of iron but of fear and habit.
In the last two stanzas the poem names its victims: the chimney-sweeper's cry blackens the churches, the soldier's sigh runs in blood down palace walls, and the young harlot's curse falls, by night, on the marriage coach and the new-born infant. It is one of the harshest indictments of the industrial city, written half a century before anyone else looked at it so.