William Blake wrote two poems called "Holy Thursday": one in his Songs of Innocence and one in his Songs of Experience, two collections he would eventually publish together as Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This was a book intended, in Blake's words, to show the "two contrary states of the human soul": fresh-eyed and childlike versus world-weary and adult. Readers who picked up this gloriously illustrated collection would have first encountered the Innocence "Holy Thursday," in which a tenderhearted speaker watches as an old London tradition takes place:
- From the 16th century onward, the city of London supported a number of “charity schools": combined schools and homes for orphaned, abandoned, and impoverished children.
- On Holy Thursday—a Christian holiday in Easter Week commemorating the Last Supper—the children who lived in these schools would parade to St. Paul's Cathedral for a service.
In the Innocence "Holy Thursday," a speaker from Blake’s own time (the turn of the 19th century) is charmed by the sight of all these kids marching to church and singing hymns. The children's sweetness, this speaker says, should teach the more fortunate a lesson: "cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door."
The poem covered in this guide, however, is the Experience version of "Holy Thursday"—and this poem's speaker takes quite a different perspective on the matter:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
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.
The poem will make its point in quatrains of forceful accentual meter. That means that while the poem doesn't use regular metrical feet (like iambs or trochees), it does stick to a regular number of beats—in this case, four beats per line, like this:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Each of those beats hits like a fist pounding the table. This strong and simple form captures the speaker's strong and simple conviction: England's management of its helpless children reveals its appalling societal failings.