Dark Places

Dark Places — An Introduction

Not all poems in the Time and Place anthology celebrate beauty. Some use place to expose suffering, inequality and isolation. In this lesson we study three poems that present “dark places”: Blake’s “London,” Afrika’s “Nothing’s Changed” and Davidson’s “In Romney Marsh.” Each poet uses a specific location to make a broader point about power, injustice or the human condition.

London — William Blake (1794)

Blake published “London” in his Songs of Experience (1794). The speaker walks through London’s streets and sees suffering everywhere: “Marks of weakness, marks of woe” on every face. The poem attacks institutions — the Church, the monarchy, the marriage laws — for allowing this misery. Blake uses the word “charter’d” twice in the opening stanza (“charter’d street,” “charter’d Thames”) to suggest that the city’s streets and even its river are owned and controlled.

Key quotations: “In every cry of every Man, / In every Infant’s cry of fear, / In every voice: in every ban” — the anaphora of “every” hammers home the universality of suffering. “The mind-forg’d manacles” is a powerful metaphor: people are imprisoned not by physical chains but by mental ones — by acceptance of authority. The final stanza’s “Marriage hearse” is an oxymoron linking love with death, suggesting that even marriage is corrupted by society.

Nothing’s Changed — Tatamkhulu Afrika (1994)

Afrika was born in Egypt and grew up in South Africa. He could have been classified as white, but he refused that privilege under apartheid. He wrote “Nothing’s Changed” after visiting District Six in Cape Town — a neighbourhood bulldozed under apartheid to remove its non-white residents. As the apartheid laws were being swept away, Afrika found that nothing had really changed: a new whites-only restaurant had appeared alongside a “working man’s café” where Black South Africans ate.

The poem is written in short, clipped stanzas with no regular rhyme, mirroring the speaker’s controlled anger. Physical details build tension: “my feet know / and my hands,” “the hot, white, inwards turning / anger of my eyes” — the body itself remembers injustice. The contrast between the restaurant (“linen falls, / the single rose”) and the café (“plastic table’s top, / wipe your fingers on your jeans”) exposes continuing inequality through place.

In Romney Marsh — John Davidson (1894)

Davidson presents Romney Marsh — a flat, windswept coastal area in Kent — as a place of wild, almost aggressive natural beauty. The poem describes a walk along the coast from late afternoon into night, with the sea, stars and wind creating an overwhelming sensory landscape. Unlike the Romantic poets’ comfortable harmony with nature, Davidson’s speaker seems dwarfed and isolated by the vast, indifferent landscape.

Key quotations: “The beach, with all its organ stops / Pealing again, prolonged the roar” — the extended metaphor of the sea as a cathedral organ gives the landscape a religious grandeur. “Masts in the offing wagged their tops; / The swinging waves pealed on the shore” — personification makes the ships part of the natural scene. The poem’s regular quatrains and ABAB rhyme scheme create a hymn-like quality, as though the speaker is worshipping the landscape even as it overwhelms them.