Experience: Holy Thursday Flashcards
1
Q
Context
A
The English Romantic poet William Blake wrote two poems entitled “Holy Thursday”: the first appeared in Songs of Innocence, and the second—the poem we’re treating in this guide—in his Songs of Experience. He published those collections together in an omnibus 1794 edition, Songs of Innocence and of Experience; readers were meant to encounter one poem after the other. Both describe an old tradition in which orphaned or abandoned kids housed in London’s “charity schools” paraded to St. Paul’s Cathedral on Holy Thursday, a Christian holiday during Easter week. In the first poem, a softhearted speaker is touched by the children’s innocence and their sweet singing in church. In this poem, by contrast, an angry speaker lets loose a tirade against the children’s self-satisfied guardians and against poverty in general: what does it say about English society, they ask, that so very many impoverished children need to be housed in charity schools at all?
2
Q
Child poverty and society’s failure
A
- “Holy Thursday” is a tirade against an England that starves and impoverishes its children, then pats itself on the back for handing out dribs and drabs of charity. The poem, published in William Blake’s Songs of Experience, describes impoverished orphans singing in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Holy Thursday, a religious holiday when the students of London’s charity schools traditionally paraded to church. This display, the poem’s speaker declares, is no kindly show of human warmth, but rather a travesty: London should never have allowed its children to end up in such dire straits in the first place. These impoverished children are an indictment of a disordered and monstrously selfish society.
- The speaker is horrified by the sight of the countless orphaned children singing in St. Paul’s Cathedral. There’s nothing “holy” about this event, they declare: “in a rich and fruitful land,” it’s a crime that so many kids need to live in charity schools at all. The “cold and usurous hand” (that is, the unfeeling, miserly charity) of the schools—and of the state itself—is no substitute for a social order that would keep children (and their parents, for that matter) safe, nourished, and loved from the start. If these orphans are here at all, in other words, it doesn’t mean that England is a particularly charitable country, but a broken one.
- What’s more, the speaker suggests, the schools’ charity is self-serving, not truly generous or kindhearted. In demanding that the children in their care put on a public performance of “joy” and gratitude, the people who run and fund the schools are using them. Supporting the charity schools merely allows better-off people to feel good about themselves, without addressing the fundamental problem of desperate poverty in England around the turn of the 19th century. Such “generosity” only slaps a coat of paint over a social order that makes more and more poor, orphaned, and helpless children.
3
Q
Society v Nature
A
- In a world that ran rightly, this poem’s outraged speaker cries, the orphaned children of London’s charity schools would never have ended up impoverished and reliant on meager handouts. The natural world can and should supply everything humanity needs, and natural human kindness should ensure that everyone can live a good life. English society, this poem thus suggests, has become outright unnatural: the inequalities and sufferings in England at the turn of the 19th century go against the very order of the world.
- In a “rich and fruitful land” like England, the speaker points out, there’s absolutely no reason that the countless children of London’s charity schools (homes for abandoned or orphaned kids) should be living in poverty. The country has more than enough natural resources to support them and their families comfortably. “Where’er the sun does shine” and the “rain does fall,” the speaker says, children should “never hunger”: the natural world, in other words, provides for everyone. By metaphorical extension, natural human feeling—the sunshine of kindness, the rainfall of sympathy—should work in tune with the world, making sure that everyone gets their share of nature’s bounty.
- But no, this speaker says: the artificial structures of 18th- and 19th-century English society, with its rigid class system and its dreadful poverty, jar against the world’s inherent evenhanded generosity. To the children of the charity schools, the “fields are bleak and bare” and the “sun does never shine.” In other words, a society that doesn’t provide for everyone (and especially for its most innocent and helpless members) is a society that’s working against the natural order, destroying an abundance that should be freely and evenly shared.
3
Q
And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill’d with thorns
It is eternal winter there.
A
- In the third stanza, the speaker’s tone turns from outraged to downright prophetic—in the biblical sense. (The role of a biblical prophet wasn’t to see the future: it was to warn sinners to mend their ways before they brought God’s wrath down on their heads.) As if in a trance, the speaker relays a vision of the orphans’ lives as an endless, joyless trudge through a wilderness. Listen to the ringing polysyndeton/anaphora here:
And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill’d with thorns
- Each new “and” drops fresh misery on the children’s backs. Essentially abandoned by society, they’re living in a terrible “land of poverty” all by themselves: it’s “their sun” that doesn’t shine and “their fields” that are barren. For other, better-off people, the speaker implies, this land might look very different. But so long as these children live starved, loveless lives, the whole country remains metaphorically poor.
- In the speaker’s grim vision, nature itself has gone wrong. The children live in an “eternal winter” with no relief; even the sun has stopped following its seasonal course. England’s blinkered cruelty to its children and its impoverished people, the poem implies, is outright unnatural.-
3
Q
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
A
- This incredulous rhetorical question feels like an outburst of rage against the earlier speaker’s sentimentality. Forgoing the first poem’s loving descriptions of the little children dressed up “in red and blue and green,” this speaker gets right down to brass tacks: it is an abomination, they cry, that a rich, fertile country like England should have created all these orphans in the first place. Charity is all well and good, but what’s better is for children not to be orphaned, abandoned, and starving at all. Abandoned children are also a sign of desperate or abused parents, too poor (or too dead) to care for their kids. England, this speaker insists, is more than prosperous enough to keep its people from suffering in such appalling numbers.
- For that matter, the speaker rages, the institutions that care for these children are charitable in one sense only. Sure, they offer food, shelter, and rudimentary education. But they dole these things out with a “cold and usurous hand”: without human warmth, and with the full intention of getting something in exchange for what they give. (Usury is the practice of lending out money at a ruinous interest rate.) One of the repayments the schools demand, this poem will go on to suggest, is a public show of groveling gratitude. The service at St. Paul’s isn’t just a festive, pious occasion: it’s a self-congratulatory display, a way for those who offer the children charity to feel good about themselves.
3
Q
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
A
- The speaker’s tone here suggests that their answer to these questions is: certainly not. These children aren’t freely singing a joyful hymn. They’re singing for their supper, knowing that their guardians demand a show of gratitude and good behavior. This speaker, unlike the first, hears pain and fear in their little voices.
- Again, too, the speaker makes the point that, if “so many children” are “poor,” then this isn’t a “rich and fruitful land” at all: “It is a land of poverty!” The repetition of the word “land” makes it clear that England in general (and London in particular) are rich and impoverished at exactly the same time. The country overflows with wealth; somehow, it also overflows with impoverished children. Now how, the speaker asks in a tone of deep irony, can that be?
- If England is at once rich and poor, it’s not just literally a land of poverty: it’s metaphorically impoverished, too. Only a country poor in intangible virtues—in genuine human kindness, in generosity, in wisdom—could organize its affairs in such a way that its abandoned and orphaned children fill a great cathedral to overflowing.
- The poem’s attention to what happens at St. Paul’s in particular is meaningful, too. Blake saw that church’s orderly, elegant neoclassical design as an emblem of a worldview he hated: one in which cold reason dominated, leaving no room for feeling and imagination. (He might have been amused by the 2019 event in which his painting “The Ancient of Days” was projected on the church’s dome: this famous image, often misinterpreted as a picture of God creating the world, is in fact a picture of Urizen, the blinkered god of conventional reason in Blake’s personal mythology.) The “cold and usurous” charity of the schools, Blake’s wider works might suggest, is an outgrowth of a chilly, mechanical, heartless view of the world.
4
Q
For where-e’er the sun does shine,
And where-e’er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
A
- The speaker concludes their prophetic vision with some thunderous parallelism
- In other words, anywhere the sun shines and the rain falls, there’s enough for everyone. In a world running rightly, nature can and does provide for all humanity. In its unbalanced, inhumane distribution of wealth, then, English society is cutting against nature itself, upsetting the world’s balance. The “poverty” this disordered system creates “appall[s]” the “mind,” in particular: it’s an affront not just to nature, but to what Blake would have called a God-given capacity for thought.
- The speaker here echoes the language and phrasing of the first stanza. There, they spoke of “babes reduced to misery”; here, they declare that “babe can never hunger there.” Through repetition, the poem concludes by putting right what was wrong—or, at least, showing how English society could right its wrongs.
- While this poem began as a rejoinder to the sentimental speaker of the first stanza, this speaker and that one have something in common: they see the children singing before them in St. Paul’s as precious creatures, sacred and dignified. The day’s ritual might not be “holy,” but the children themselves are. Perhaps the two speakers might even be read as two feelings struggling for dominance in the same mind: tender sympathy for the children vying with outrage against the world that has hurt them.
5
Q
Meter
A
- “Holy Thursday” is written in powerful, driving accentual meter. That means that while the poem doesn’t stick to any particular metrical foot (like the da-DUM of iambs or the DUM-da-da of dactyls), it does keep to a certain number of stressed beats per line—in this case, four.
- Those beats don’t land on the same syllables of the line, but they do march on steadily, creating a rhythm that makes the poem sound like the angriest political nursery rhyme you ever did hear. The striding meter captures the speaker’s forthright rage and sorrow at the plight of London’s orphans, not to mention the plight of a blighted, blinkered London.
5
Q
Form
A
- Like many of the poems in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, “Holy Thursday” uses a deceptively simple form. With its four short quatrains (four-line stanzas) in homespun accentual meter, the poem looks and sounds like a nursery rhyme.
- But while some nursery rhymes are certainly bleak or eerie, few make such an unguarded and impassioned social critique as this poem does. Here, the forceful simplicity of Blake’s form conveys his rage over what he feels to be a painfully, appallingly straightforward point: the way England runs right now simply isn’t right, in ways the youngest child could understand (and in ways the youngest children are suffering for).
6
Q
Setting
A
- “Holy Thursday” is set, as its title suggests, on Holy Thursday—a Christian religious holiday just before Easter which commemorates the Last Supper. This was a day focused on humility and service. Churchgoers on Holy Thursday often performed a ritual foot-washing in imitation of Christ, who was said to have humbly washed the Apostles’ feet before that final meal.
- It makes sense, then, that the children of London’s 18th- and 19th-century charity schools traditionally paraded to St. Paul’s Cathedral for a church service on this day. Their procession was meant to show off both their gratitude to their caretakers and those caretakers’ humble goodness.
- Blake took a special interest in this orphan parade. He wrote two poems on the subject, one in Songs of Innocence, the other (the version we’re focusing on here) in Songs of Experience. The version in Innocence takes the procession at face value, or at least appears to: how lovely, the poem’s softhearted speaker says, to see all these innocent little children singing together in church under the watchful eyes of wise guardians. This version, by contrast, decries the fact that London produces so very many impoverished orphans that it needs special schools for them—and that those who run the schools feel the need to “humbly” display their charges this way, patting themselves on the back for being so very good.
