Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience) โ€“ Summary and Analysis

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Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)


William Blakeโ€™s poem โ€œHoly Thursdayโ€ was first published in Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1794. Unlike its companion poem in โ€œSongs of Innocenceโ€ (1789), this poem focuses on society as a whole rather than on the London ceremony.

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Holy Thursdayย (Text)

Is this a holy thing to see,ย 
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reducd to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?


Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!


And their sun does never shine.ย 
And their fields are bleak &ย bare.ย 
And their ways are fillโ€™d with thorns.ย 
It is eternal winter there.


For where-eโ€™er the sun does shine,ย 
And where-eโ€™er the rain does fall:ย 
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

Summary

The narrator thinks it is scandalous that a country as โ€œrich and fruitfulโ€ as England subjects so many of its children to poverty. The second verse, in fact, corrects the first: England cannot be considered โ€œrichโ€ when there are so many poor children living there. These children live in a state of โ€œeternal winterโ€ surrounded by sunless, desolate landscapes. Again, the final line goes on to say that there can be no other seasons as long as children go hungry. Sunshine and rain are causes for joy, but we have no right to enjoy joy when thousands of people are suffering all around us.

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Blake, on the other hand, points to places where โ€œthe sun does shineโ€ because a kid โ€œcan never hungerโ€ฆNor poverty the mind appalโ€

Analysis


The poem follows up where Songs of Innocence left off on Holy Thursday, with a reference to the yearly Holy Thursday (Ascension Day) service at St Paulโ€™s Cathedral for the destitute children of London charity schools. Yet there is nothing โ€œholyโ€ about a ceremony that exposes how many thousands of youngsters in England are โ€œreduced to miseryโ€ The poem calls into question the basic notion of Britain as a wealthy and civilised country. Britain was the worldโ€™s wealthiest superpower in the 1790s, so the claim that it was a โ€œland of povertyโ€ was revolutionary. The poem also criticises the entire system of providing care for disadvantaged children as โ€œcold and usurousโ€ (usury is the practice of lending money for profit, by charging interest on it and therefore getting back more than you lent). This may appear to be a harsh description, but keep in mind that the charity schools of the eighteenth century were designed to train children for the cruellest industries. This resulted in a profit for their employers but resulted in the deaths of thousands of children.
โ€œHoly Thursdayโ€ is made up of four quatrains. The first is a heroic quatrain (ABAB), but the other three are not. The absence of rhyme in the second verse creates discord (ABCD, although there may be an intended slant rhyme for โ€œjoyโ€ and โ€œpovertyโ€ in their spelling). The latter two adhere to the ABCB pattern. Like the subject matter, the exploitation and mistreatment of children become obvious to the reader, this irregularity contributes to the poemโ€™s tone of decay and confusion.
The โ€œHoly Thursdayโ€ of Innocence could be read in two ways. This version is brutal and should only be taken as a sharp condemnation of the theological hypocrisy inherent in Blakeโ€™s dayโ€™s institutions.

The โ€œeternal winterโ€ in which the children dwell implies that poverty is a natural state of death and that the true order of things does not include children languishing in squalor and starvation. The youngsters are deprived of the sun and life-giving rains of summer and spring, and are thus condemned to this unnatural existence by the machinations of a system that remembers them only to prove its own righteousness.

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