Holy Thursday Experience

Question 1

In a rich and fruitful land:

Answer 1

• Reference to England; England has the capacity to help those suffering but choses not to.
• Sardonic tone.
• Radical Political voice

Question 2

Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Answer 2

• First stanza is an accusatory question.
• ‘hand’ -> Synedoche
• ‘Usurous’ -> Exploitative, the curch gives food to promotes their own image and the expectation of obediance. + Lending but expecting more back.

Question 3

Is that trembling cry a song?

Answer 3

• Blake’s criticism of the children’s suffering.

Question 4

Can it be a song of joy?

Answer 4

• Children cover their sadness with Hymns/ they are crying for help.

Question 5

It is a land of poverty!

Answer 5

• Contrasts with ‘fruitful’, highlighting the class divide.

Question 6

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns;

Answer 6

• Pathetic fallacy
• Destruction of nature, without nature there are restrictions and poverty.
• Repetition of ‘their’, this ‘charity’ has personally affected these people.
• ‘Thorns’ -> Biblical reference, Used to mock jesus, now mocking children, Kid’s are jesus.
• ‘Bleak and bare’ Monotony of their life. Alliteration which emphasises their blunt + barren life. Semantic field of ‘lack’ social disparity.

Question 7

‘It is eternal winter there.’

Answer 7

• Hyperbolic hopelessness

Question 8

‘From where’er the sun does shine,
and where’er the rain does fall.’

Answer 8

• When nature should return, it will bring freedom + fruitfulness.
• Government = Bad, Nature = Good
• Idealised world away from = industrialisation