Comparison Of holy Thursday (expeirnce And Innocence)

Question 1

What do the two poems reflect?

Answer 1

Blake’s theory of contrariness, the title of the poem refers to Thursday before Easter Sunday

Question 2

Thursday before Easter what happens?

Answer 2

Observed by Christians in commemoration of Christ’s last suppler

• washing feet is performed
• the celebrant washes the feet of 12 people to commemorate Christ washing his disciples feet

Question 3

How did Holy Thursday survive in England?

Answer 3

Custom survived of giving alms to the poor

Question 4

Different approaches

Answer 4

• theme is different ( first is light and ironic)

- second is more savage and direct

Question 5

Difference in events

Answer 5

In innocence, Blake describes public appearance of charity school children

• in experience he criticises the institutions responsible for hapless children
• speaker entertains questions about the children as victims of cruelty and injustice( some in which the earlier poem implied)

Question 6

Rhetorical technique in experience

Answer 6

Pose a number of suspicious questions that receive indirect yet quite censoriously toned answers

Question 7

Sermon at the end

Answer 7

• innocent song ends on a positive note without preaching a sermon while the experienced speaker preachers a sermon that is negative in tone full of anxiety about the destruction of moral obligation

Question 8

What does Blake do with both poems?

Answer 8

Clarifies his view of the hypocrisy of formalised religion and it’s claimed acts of charity
- exposes the established church’s self congratulatory hymns as a sham that the sound of the children is only a trembling cry

Question 9

In innocence how are the children first described and what does this show?

Answer 9

‘Flowers of London town’ - emphasises their beauty and fragility - undercuts the assumption that these destitute children are the city’s refuse and burden rendering them instead as London’s fairest and finest

Question 10

In Holy Thursday how does the children’s image change?

Answer 10

Described as resembling lambs in their innocence and meekness

• then become the character of humming ‘multitudes’ into something heavenly and sublime
• as children sing in third stanza they are no longer just weak and mild - strength of their combined voices raised toward God evokes something more powerful and puts them in direct contact with heaven

Question 11

Simile for children’s song in songs of innocence

Answer 11

First given as ‘a mighty wind’ and then as ‘harmonious thunderings’
- the beadles are eclipsed in their aged pallor by the internal radiance of the children

Question 12

Final line in songs of innocence

Answer 12

Advises compassion for the poor

- Blake emphasises the heaven lines and innocent children

Question 13

What does the beginning of Holy Thursday in innocence transform to in experience

Answer 13

‘Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy?

Question 14

Questions in experience what do we learn?

Answer 14

That whatever care the children receive is minimal and grudgingly bestowed
- ‘the cold and usurous hand’ that feeds them is motivated by self interest rather than love and pity

Question 15

What does the ‘hand’ represent in songs of experience

Answer 15

Metonymically represents not just the daily guardians of the orphans by the city of London as a whole

• entire city has a civic responsibility to these helpless members of society
• yet it delegates or denies this obligation

Question 16

What do the children have to participate in in songs of experience?

Answer 16

A public display of joy that poorly reflects their actual circumstances
- serves rather to reinforce the self righteous complacency of those who are supposed to care for them

Question 17

What does the song in songs of innocence turn into?

Answer 17

A ‘trembling cry’
- first poem the parade of children found natural symbolisation in London’s mighty river but here the children and natural world conceptually connect via a strikingly different set of images
- fault crops and sunless fields symbolise the wasting of a nations resources and public’s negligence of the future
-

Question 18

What do the thorns in songs of experience show

Answer 18

Link their suffering to that of Christ

- they live in an ‘eternal winter’ where they experience neither physical comfort nor the warmth of love

Question 19

Don’t of Holy Thursday in innocence

Answer 19

Meek and lenient

• poem calls upon the reader to be more critical than the speaker is
• asked to contemplate the true meaning of Christian pity and to contrast the institutionalised charity of the schools with the love of which God and innocent children are capable

Question 20

First 2 stanzas of innocence

Answer 20

Unsettling aspects

• mention of children’s clean faces which have been tided up
• public display of love and charity conceals the cruelty to which impoverished children were often subjected
• orderliness of the children’s March and the ominous ‘wands’ of the beadles suggest rigidity, regimentation and the violent authority

Question 21

What does the children’s song suggest in innocence

Answer 21

The tempestuousness of the children’s song as the poem transitions from visual to aural imagery carries a suggestion of divine vengeance