Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)

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Holy Thursday was published in William Blake's "Songs of Experience" in 1794. This poem, unlike its contemporary in "Songs of Innocence", focuses more on society as a whole than the Holy Thursday ceremony.

The primary objective of this poem is to question social and moral injustice. In the first stanza, Blake contrasts the "rich and fruitful land" with the actions of a "cold and usurous hand" - thereby continuing his questioning of the virtue of a society where resources are abundant but children are still "reduced to misery".

"Holy" or "Maundy" Thursday refers to the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples as recorded in the biblical New Testament. One particularly significant episode during that event was that of the master's washing of his disciples' feet - an act which signified the utmost humility in service. English monarchs and the wealthy traditionally used this festival for symbolic acts of charity: with the complementary poem in "Songs of Innocence", Blake pictures such an act, of which he appears to approve, carried out in St. Paul's Cathedral. However, our appreciation of the "wise guardians of the poor" thus advertising their charity may not be wholly shared by Blake's "Piper", the supposed narrator of the "Songs of Innocence". In their state of innocence, children should not be regimented; rather, they should be playing blithely on the "ecchoing green". The children in this poem 'assert and preserve their essential innocence not by going to church, but by freely and spontaneously, "like a mighty wind," raising to "heaven the voice of song." ' (Robert F. Gleckner: Point of View and Context in Blake's Songs - included in "Twentieth Century Views: Blake, A Collection of Critical Essays." Ed Northrop Frye: Prentice-Hall Inc. 1966)

With his "Holy Thursday" of the "Songs of Experience", Blake's "Bard" clarifies his view of the hypocrisy of formalised religion and its claimed acts of charity. He exposes the established church's self-congratulatory hymns as a sham, suggesting in his second stanza that the sound which would represent the day more accurately would be the "trembling cry" of a poor child.

The poet, as Bard, states that although England may be objectively a "rich and fruitful land", the unfeeling profit-orientated power of authority has designed for the innocent children suffering within it an "eternal winter". The biblical connotations of the rhetorical opening point us towards Blake's assertion that a country whose children live in want cannot be described as truly "rich". With the apparent contradiction of two climatic opposites existing simultaneously within the one geopolitical unit, we are offered a metaphor for England's man-made "two nations".

The meaning of the final stanza is debatable, although one interpretation is that it refers to the world as whole and asserts that there is no justified reason for children (and indeed the poor) to suffer in the developed world.

The righteous anger which drives the work implicitly denies the claims of the established church - which Blake condemns as complicit in creating poverty - to be "holy". Understood metaphorically, the final quatrain tells us that in a land of life-giving sun and rain there would be no class condemned to starve.

Blake was writing during the "agricultural revolution", whose pioneers congratulated themselves upon their vigorous increases in output. The poet argues that until increases in production are linked to more equitable distribution, England will always be a land of barren winter.

Comparatively, its companion poem is a lot lighter in tone and more subtle in its questioning - hence the contrasting titles of the volumes in which they are respectively contained (Innocence, Experience).