Who the exact speaker is isn’t mentioned, but from Blake’s known interests and character, it can be assumed to be him. The narrator considers it a scandal that a country as 'rich and fruitful' as England condemns so many of its children to live in poverty. In the second stanza, he corrects himself: England cannot be called 'rich' when there are such huge numbers of poor children living there. Directed on a personal level to the reader, it is engaging, with questions and answers. The third quatrain reflects his observations on a metaphorical level. The sun, a source of light and heat and the basis of life and growth, never shines, exemplifying a lack of physical, mental and emotional care. Their fields, a sign of organized development, are ‘bleak’ (exposed to winds, cold and cutting) and ‘bare’ (fruitless). This can be read as a discouraging future perspective with hardly a chance to escape. Their ways are filled with thorns, which are painful obstacles. ‘Eternal winter’ is a hyperbolic metaphor of hopelessness, with no chance of spring life and rejuvenation. Quatrain four provides a contrast to three; a place of eternal sunshine and rainfall provides a basis for a thriving society in which basic physical needs (such as hunger) are satisfied, and in which the mind is relieved of the ghost of poverty. These last two stanzas reason that sunshine and rain are cause for happiness, and we have no right to such happiness when thousands are suffering all around us.
On Holy Thursday “some 6,000 of the poorest children from the charity schools of London [had to march] into St. Paul’s… for a compulsory exhibition of their piety and gratitude to their patrons.” (Erdman, 23) This situation and setting is ironic as there can be nothing 'holy' about a service which shows us how many thousands of children are 'reduced to misery' in England. In this way, it challenges the very image of Great Britain as a rich and civilized nation. In the 1790s Britain was the world's wealthiest superpower (Erdman, 29), so the statement that it was 'a land of poverty' was radical. By caring for poor children in a 'cold and usurous' way, Blake implies that these authorities are getting back more than they are giving, that they are profiting from their charity. Charity schools of the eighteenth century were aimed at turning out child workers for the most brutal industries (Erdman, 30), which brought profit to their employers but drove thousands of children to an early death. This is the situation and setting for both of Blake’s Holy Thursday poems and though they occur in London, it isn’t directly mentioned. A less distinctly physical place that is repeatedly mentioned in the Experience poem is “there,” which may be interpreted on a number of levels. It may indicate a physical location, such as London, the social standing where the poor are trapped, or an emotional and psychological state where the poverty-stricken often reside.
Line length, meter, and rhythm are not all consistent through the poem. While each quatrain has four feet and thus is in tetrameter, the rhythm varies between them. The first with an abab rhyme is like a lullaby. The second has no rhyme pattern which creates a disharmonious sound, especially after the lulling rhyme of the first, and puts a strong emphasis on the conclusive ‘It is.’ It does follow a trochaic, trochaic, trochaic, iambic pattern though that occurs in the third and fourth quatrains as well. The last two also have an abcb rhyme pattern that ties them together, as they are illustrating clear parallels.
Blake’s 1794 poem “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Experience, clearly illustrates his concern with society and its morals in his time. Using irony and metaphors, it looks as charity with a hypocritical eye. The poems structure is obvious, as each quatrain builds to a larger level in the next. The first sees charity as two-faced in such a rich society. The second sees poor children in a poor country while the third speaks of a world of no future perspectives for these children. In the last quatrain Blake expresses his idea of a perfect world. We are shown how mankind is blind to worlds that are not our own; when our own lives are decent, how could a child be hungry? We do not even realize that poverty exists; it does not appall us unless we are its victims.
Works Cited
Blake, William. “Holy Thursday-1794.” The Harbrace Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Jon C. Stott, et al. Canada: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1998. p 106.
Erdman, David V. Blake Prophet Against Empire: A Poet s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1969.