Holy Thursday (Experience)
Holy Thursday (Experience) - context Summary
Composed in 1789
Written for Songs of Experience (1789), Blake’s "Holy Thursday (Experience)" responds to the spectacle of charity parades by exposing the hypocrisy of organized benevolence. Rhetorical questions and bleak imagery present children as victims of poverty in a supposedly prosperous nation. The poem criticizes social institutions that offer cold, measured aid instead of real relief, ending with a contrasting ideal where sunshine and rain banish hunger and deprivation.
Read Complete AnalysesIs 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.
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