London Smog
The romantic imagery of London shrouded in almost a protective cocoon of white grayish fog gives way to a much more disturbing corruption of normalcy. The fog which is settling in as the poem’s opening image is not even given the decency of being called fog; it is a “vapour.” And it isn’t white or even grey, but “tawny” which is suggestive of mustard yellowish-brown and something even worse that is brownish-yellow. Things are not right in ye olde London Towne and the abnormal smog is imagery which acts as foreshadowing that will be touched upon again later.
A Light Extinguished
The very same opening stanza that begins with that imagery of a fog that isn’t normal concludes with an image of light growing dim and cold. This also acts as foreshadowing of the arrival of the news that the husband not in London is never going to be there every again. At least not in living form as his light has been waning and is about be extinguished and grow cold with a knock on the door.
Rhyme Time
The rhyme scheme maintains coherency throughout, following a set ABBAB template even as it at the same time is written in a corrupted meter. The meter doesn’t matter, however, as it is the rhyme that keeps the time. Imagery is subtly created as each stanza commits to the rhyme scheme and doesn’t alter (except for substituting mere assonance instead of true rhyme in the second stanza. (Seriously, not even using a British accent allows “smartly” to rhyme with “shortly.”) What is occurring here is that the rhyme becomes predictable with only the one occasional drift outside the rigid rules. This is imagery replicating the concept of war being predictable as a general rule of life with only occasional drifts separating them all from being exactly identical. The rhyme suggests a cyclical mechanism to history which almost verges making the husband’s death a foregone conclusion.
London Town
It is curious that the poet chooses to explicitly identify the city where the wife is located despite pretty much every other detail that might describe her vague or completely hidden. We don’t know the name of either her or her husband. The only two other characters are identified by their job. Even the foreign soil on which the husband spills his blood defending queen and England is dismissively referenced as someplace “in the far South Land.” And yet, the poet felt compelled to shatter what could otherwise have been a completely universal poem capable of being applied to any wife in any city in the world by putting London in the title. Having don’t that, what does he then proceed to do? Give the reader a Victorian London which is utterly devoid of any of the magic that has since come to be associated with that time and place. In fact, London is characterized by just one all-encompassing bit of imagery: gloomy fog and marriages doomed by political and military miscalculation.
