Holy Thursday (Innocence)

In this section we’ll be looking at another pair of antitypes from the collection called Holy Thursday.

Before we start dissecting these poems, just to give you some context, Holy Thursday was an annual event held in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, already suggesting that Blake witnessed this first-hand. Around 6000 children would come each year from the almshouses in London to demonstrate their piety and commemorate the Last Supper. They would be dressed in bright colours and escorted by the beadles, before singing their thanks, just to explain the imagery Blake uses in these poems. This was at a time when charity houses were neglecting the children, hence many starved to death. In these poems, Blake condemns organised religion for making children be grateful for charity that they wouldn’t need, had the Church not condoned what put them in that situation to begin with.

First, we will look at the Innocence half of the pairing.

Holy Thursday

Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean

The children walking two & two in red & blue & green

Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow

Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow

O what a multitude they seemd these flowers of London town

Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own

The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs

Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song

Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among

Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor

Then cherish pity; lest you drive an angel from your door

Form and Structure

The poem has a hymn-like quality, already introducing Blake’s indictment of organised religion.

It contains three stanzas composed of two rhyming couplets. The first stanza is one long stanza, symbolising the long train of children or the flowing river they are compared to.

The remaining stanzas are in closed couplet as contrast, demonstrating the closed nature of the speaker’s thoughts.

Most of the poem follows a regular stressed heptameter (four beats in first half of each line, closed with three), neatly tying up the phrase. But the last line in the first stanza disrupts this regularity, while spondees at the start and end of the third stanza create emphasis and enhances the magnitude of the scene.

Stanza One

The speaker is neither Blake nor a child, but an observer of the emotionally affective scene. This stanza seeks to capture the movement of the children, comparing this to the movement of the Thames, flowing through the heart of London. But this vision has negative aspects:

·         The children’s faces are clean, denoting their purity and innocence, suggesting that they have been scrubbed to be presentable for this occasion. But in usual life, they would have been dirty and neglected.

·         Their uniformity suggests rigidity and restriction of organised religion as they are escorted by the beadles

·         The beadles are one of Blake’s many figures of authority capable of inflicting punishment, but in this instance they are viewed as benevolent. Their rods are depicted as magic wands, and not a symbol of punishment

Stanza Two

The children transform into the “flowers of London”, not being destitute children who rely on charity, but the city’s fairest product with a “radiance” like angels.

They are then described as a “multitude of lambs” in their meekness and mildness, and while this is used to depict their innocent nature, this also demonstrates how they become the sacrificial victims of London society. The lamb metaphor links the children to Christ and reminds the reader of Jesus’ tenderness and care for children.

The “hum of multitudes” in association with lambs and angels may also be associated with Revelation 5:11-14. This “hum of multitudes” may also signify the social unrest taking place at this time with the French Revolution, suggesting an approaching threat.

Despite appearing innocent on the surface, there is an undercurrent of tension and experience that runs through this stanza.

Stanza Three

The children cease appearing frail and mild, but rather, combined, their voices become powerful and are raised to heaven. The powerful metonymy of “mighty wind” and “harmonious thunderings” are glorious, however, they are also potentially destructive.

The beadles’ position “beneath” the children may be taken in a literal sense, in that they sit beneath them in the cathedral, or that they are beneath them in a moral sense, or in the sense that they remain earthbound while the children are elevated to heaven.

The final line, like Blake’s Chimney Sweeper ends with the doctrine of organised religion that Blake indicts in this collection. If the children don’t cherish this “pity”, they threaten to drive away the benefit of an angel away, and therefore threaten to lose benefit for themselves. But it is because organised religion condoned exploitative actions that the children find themselves in this position of charity to begin with, highlighting the sheer corruption and hypocrisy of Blake’s contemporary religious institutions. But Blake does not want to disregard pity, being a religious man himself, rather, he recognises that true pity would not be so self-regarded as it is described in this poem.

This poem reflects the quote by critic Dykstra:

“institutions and their subjects uphold cruel and unjust social systems at the expense of an unrepresented minority”

Next we will move onto the other Holy Thursday poem and compare the two, but that will be in another section.