Holy Thursday (Experience)

This section will be looking at the Song of Experience Holy Thursday. If you haven’t read my previous section on its Innocence counterpart, you can find that here. As a poem of Experience, compared to Innocence, this version is a more explicit and blunt indictment of society and institutions, where Experience is no longer alluded to, but clearly thrives.

Holy Thursday

Is this a holy thing to see,

In a rich and fruitful land,

Babes reduced 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.

And their fields are bleak & bare.

And their ways are fill’d with thorns

It is eternal winter there.

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.

Form and Structure

The poem consists of four quatrains, the first following an ABAB rhyme scheme and having four stresses per line. However, in the second stanza the rhyme scheme breaks down entirely to give way to a rhyme scheme in the last two stanzas, CDED and CFDF respectively. Just as the speaker thinks they’ve identified a pattern of behaviour and question it, the rhyme scheme adopts an order and then disrupts it. The speaker must then re-organise a response, just as the rhyme scheme reorganises itself.

The speaker is once again an observer, only this time more enraged by what they have witnessed. They adopt a bard or prophet-like role.

The tone is one of fury, the lines are much shorter either serving as rhetorical questions or exclamations, and so a contrast to its Innocence antitype.

Stanza One

In the first stanza, the ideas of riches or fruitfulness are contrasted with poverty, showing the imbalances in the London society that Blake spectated and was outraged by. Despite the “rich and fruitful land” of England, “babes” are only barely “fed” by a “cold hand” that is impersonal to their plight, and is “usurous”, exploitative of the poor.

This synecdoche represents London as a whole. They question how this gathering of poor children can be presented as “holy”, thereby questioning religious institutions who can condone such a thing.

Stanza Two

The “trembling cry” that is denied the description of a “song” highlights the children’s vulnerability and tenderness, while “trembling” suggests weakness, but also that they are fearful or close to tears.

In being a "land of poverty", the real nature of contemporary England is completely contrary to the opening description of it being a "rich and fruitful land".

Stanza Three

The “rich and fruitful land” of England is a fallacy as children occupy a world that is “fill’d with thorns”. But people are so blind to this that the children’s reality seems to be separate from the normal natural world.

The literal “eternal winter” that England has been subjected to can also be a spiritual “winter”, so a death of any compassion and justness.

Stanza Four

This last stanza has been cited by critics as an evocation of Revelation of the New Testament. A promised New Earth and Heaven is described as not needing the Sun and where there are no tears. Therefore the speaker is saying that society shouldn’t wait for New Earth, rather a humane world subject to “sun” and “rain” (note the metonymy), or even the “reign” of the “son” of God (wordplay!) shouldn’t allow such dreadful poverty.

England has made itself inhumane and unnatural, where people console the poor with promises of an other-worldly relief to keep them on earth living in bleak misery. But these people also have the capacity to stop this and prevent poverty, which Blake urges his reader to do. This utopian vision of England of a redeemed land could be a vision of an afterlife, or what Blake hopes his readers can aspire towards to make a reality.

The title of the poem Holy Thursday is ironic in itself, in that the events being witnessed are wholly unholy, we cannot honour the holiness of this day. This hypocrisy represents the hypocrisy of the Church in preaching doctrines on how one conducts themselves in a good way, but then condones such unjust exploitation for their own benefit.

And that’s Holy Thursday complete! I usually try to get antitypes into my essay since you’re supposed to reference around 5/6 poems in your comparison, and even if you only explore one of them you can quickly mention and compare it to its counterpart, so I would highly suggest learning this pair, especially if religion or poverty/deprivation were to come up!