The Full Text of “Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)”
1Is this a holy thing to see
2In a rich and fruitful land,
3Babes reduced to misery
4Fed with cold and usurous hand?
5Is that trembling cry a song?
6Can it be a song of joy?
7And so many children poor?
8It is a land of poverty!
9And their sun does never shine.
10And their fields are bleak & bare.
11And their ways are fill'd with thorns
12It is eternal winter there.
13For where-e'er the sun does shine,
14And where-e'er the rain does fall:
15Babe can never hunger there,
16Nor poverty the mind appall.
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“Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Introduction
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The English Romantic poet William Blake wrote two poems entitled "Holy Thursday": the first appeared in Songs of Innocence, and the second—the poem we're treating in this guide—in his Songs of Experience. He published those collections together in an omnibus 1794 edition, Songs of Innocence and of Experience; readers were meant to encounter one poem after the other. Both describe an old tradition in which orphaned or abandoned kids housed in London's "charity schools" paraded to St. Paul's Cathedral on Holy Thursday, a Christian holiday during Easter week. In the first poem, a softhearted speaker is touched by the children's innocence and their sweet singing in church. In this poem, by contrast, an angry speaker lets loose a tirade against the children's self-satisfied guardians and against poverty in general: what does it say about English society, they ask, that so very many impoverished children need to be housed in charity schools at all?
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“Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Summary
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Is it a holy thing, in a wealthy, fertile country, to see miserable and penniless children offered heartless, miserly, self-interested charity?
Are the children's wavering cries meant to be music? How could that sound possibly be considered a joyful song? How are there so many poor kids here? This is a poor country indeed!
The sun never shines on these children, and the fields never grow food for them. They must walk thorny paths; they live in an endless winter.
For wherever the sun shines and the rain falls, children can never go hungry, and horrifying poverty can't exist.
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“Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Themes
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Child Poverty and Society's Failures
“Holy Thursday” is a tirade against an England that starves and impoverishes its children, then pats itself on the back for handing out dribs and drabs of charity. The poem, published in William Blake’s Songs of Experience, describes impoverished orphans singing in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Holy Thursday, a religious holiday when the students of London’s charity schools traditionally paraded to church. This display, the poem’s speaker declares, is no kindly show of human warmth, but rather a travesty: London should never have allowed its children to end up in such dire straits in the first place. These impoverished children are an indictment of a disordered and monstrously selfish society.
The speaker is horrified by the sight of the countless orphaned children singing in St. Paul’s Cathedral. There’s nothing “holy” about this event, they declare: “in a rich and fruitful land,” it’s a crime that so many kids need to live in charity schools at all. The “cold and usurous hand” (that is, the unfeeling, miserly charity) of the schools—and of the state itself—is no substitute for a social order that would keep children (and their parents, for that matter) safe, nourished, and loved from the start. If these orphans are here at all, in other words, it doesn’t mean that England is a particularly charitable country, but a broken one.
What’s more, the speaker suggests, the schools’ charity is self-serving, not truly generous or kindhearted. In demanding that the children in their care put on a public performance of “joy” and gratitude, the people who run and fund the schools are using them. Supporting the charity schools merely allows better-off people to feel good about themselves, without addressing the fundamental problem of desperate poverty in England around the turn of the 19th century. Such “generosity” only slaps a coat of paint over a social order that makes more and more poor, orphaned, and helpless children.
This isn’t Blake’s only poem titled “Holy Thursday.” There’s a companion piece in his Songs of Innocence, the counterpart to Songs of Experience, in which a speaker reflects on the sweetness and beauty of all the little children making their way to church. In that poem, a subtle undercurrent of irony suggested that something wasn’t quite right about this sight; in this poem, the outrage comes blazing to the front. In both cases, the speaker takes a special interest in the fate of children. What happens to helpless kids, these poems suggest, shows you all you need to know about the society they live in.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Society vs. Nature
In a world that ran rightly, this poem’s outraged speaker cries, the orphaned children of London’s charity schools would never have ended up impoverished and reliant on meager handouts. The natural world can and should supply everything humanity needs, and natural human kindness should ensure that everyone can live a good life. English society, this poem thus suggests, has become outright unnatural: the inequalities and sufferings in England at the turn of the 19th century go against the very order of the world.
In a “rich and fruitful land” like England, the speaker points out, there’s absolutely no reason that the countless children of London’s charity schools (homes for abandoned or orphaned kids) should be living in poverty. The country has more than enough natural resources to support them and their families comfortably. “Where’er the sun does shine” and the “rain does fall,” the speaker says, children should “never hunger”: the natural world, in other words, provides for everyone. By metaphorical extension, natural human feeling—the sunshine of kindness, the rainfall of sympathy—should work in tune with the world, making sure that everyone gets their share of nature’s bounty.
But no, this speaker says: the artificial structures of 18th- and 19th-century English society, with its rigid class system and its dreadful poverty, jar against the world’s inherent evenhanded generosity. To the children of the charity schools, the “fields are bleak and bare” and the “sun does never shine.” In other words, a society that doesn’t provide for everyone (and especially for its most innocent and helpless members) is a society that’s working against the natural order, destroying an abundance that should be freely and evenly shared.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)”
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Lines 1-4
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery
Fed with cold and usurous hand?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.
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Lines 5-8
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
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Lines 9-12
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. -
Lines 13-16
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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“Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Rhetorical Question
"Holy Thursday" kicks off with a series of furious rhetorical questions:
Is 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?The implied answer to each of these questions is: absolutely not. The sight of countless orphans making their way to church is anything but holy, the speaker feels. It's downright unholy and unnatural, an indictment of a society that creates so many abandoned and impoverished kids in the first place.
The next questions put readers in the scene alongside the speaker, listening to the children singing a hymn in church. Their "trembling cry," the speaker implies, is no "song of joy"; it might as well be a wail of despair.
Not only do these rhetorical questions conjure up the speaker's outraged tone, but they also put this poem in conversation with its predecessor. In Blake's earlier take on "Holy Thursday," which appears in Songs of Innocence, the speaker is perfectly charmed by the sight of all those sweet children singing in church. This speaker is clearly responding to that one. They don't even bother to describe the children; the first speaker has already done that. They simply burst out in a tirade against all that the original speaker found so touching, undermining the foundations of that innocent first impression.
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Allusion
Unlock all 215 words of this analysis of Allusion in “Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience),” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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“Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Babes
- Usurous
- Where-e'er
- Appall
Babes-
Little children.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)”
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Form
Like many of the poems in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, "Holy Thursday" uses a deceptively simple form. With its four short quatrains (four-line stanzas) in homespun accentual meter, the poem looks and sounds like a nursery rhyme.
But while some nursery rhymes are certainly bleak or eerie, few make such an unguarded and impassioned social critique as this poem does. Here, the forceful simplicity of Blake's form conveys his rage over what he feels to be a painfully, appallingly straightforward point: the way England runs right now simply isn't right, in ways the youngest child could understand (and in ways the youngest children are suffering for).
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Meter
"Holy Thursday" is written in powerful, driving accentual meter. That means that while the poem doesn't stick to any particular metrical foot (like the da-DUM of iambs or the DUM-da-da of dactyls), it does keep to a certain number of stressed beats per line—in this case, four. Here's how that works out in the first two lines:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,Those beats don't land on the same syllables of the line, but they do march on steadily, creating a rhythm that makes the poem sound like the angriest political nursery rhyme you ever did hear. The striding meter captures the speaker's forthright rage and sorrow at the plight of London's orphans, not to mention the plight of a blighted, blinkered London.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of "Holy Thursday" varies:
- Sometimes, as in the first stanza, the poem uses a forceful alternating ABAB pattern.
- Sometimes, as in the second, it uses a softer ABCB pattern and perhaps even a slant rhyme (like joy / poverty in lines 6 and 8).
Both these patterns are pretty simple, the kind of rhymes one might hear in a folk song or a ballad. The unpredictable mixture of the patterns, however, makes this simple-looking poem feel subtly ragged around the edges. It's as if the speaker's voice is breaking a little as they rage against false charity and the sufferings of children.
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“Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Speaker
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This poem’s outraged speaker sounds a lot like William Blake himself. Blake made no secret of his horror at his society’s evils. Songs of Experience is only one of many works in which he takes a rumbling, prophetic stand against injustice, poverty, and cruelty, especially where they hurt children. Blake took a special interest in the failings of his native England (and London in particular, where he lived nearly all his life). England, to Blake, could be a place of deep, holy goodness and beauty—but not while the English were managing it this way.
Whether or not one reads the speaker as Blake, they're certainly Blakean: a passionate, loving, exuberant soul who simply cannot countenance the everyday misery plaguing their country. This speaker feels the fate of the charity school children as particularly appalling, an affront to human goodness and the order of nature itself.
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“Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Setting
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"Holy Thursday" is set, as its title suggests, on Holy Thursday—a Christian religious holiday just before Easter which commemorates the Last Supper. This was a day focused on humility and service. Churchgoers on Holy Thursday often performed a ritual foot-washing in imitation of Christ, who was said to have humbly washed the Apostles' feet before that final meal.
It makes sense, then, that the children of London's 18th- and 19th-century charity schools traditionally paraded to St. Paul's Cathedral for a church service on this day. Their procession was meant to show off both their gratitude to their caretakers and those caretakers' humble goodness.
Blake took a special interest in this orphan parade. He wrote two poems on the subject, one in Songs of Innocence, the other (the version we're focusing on here) in Songs of Experience. The version in Innocence takes the procession at face value, or at least appears to: how lovely, the poem's softhearted speaker says, to see all these innocent little children singing together in church under the watchful eyes of wise guardians. This version, by contrast, decries the fact that London produces so very many impoverished orphans that it needs special schools for them—and that those who run the schools feel the need to "humbly" display their charges this way, patting themselves on the back for being so very good.
The setting makes this a poem very much of its era. Blake's London at the turn of the 19th century was a place of deep economic inequality, intense religious strictures (and hypocrisy)—and a new, exciting surge of outrage against the institutions that kept these injustices in place.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)”
Literary Context
William Blake (1757-1827) is a poet unlike any other. Often considered one of the first of the English Romantics, he also stands apart from any movement as a unique philosopher, prophet, and artist.
Blake first printed this version of "Holy Thursday" in Songs of Experience (1794), one of his most famous and important works. This group of poems formed the second section of his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a book that examines what Blake called "the two contrary states of the human soul."
Many of the poems in Songs of Experience have a counterpart in Songs of Innocence, a twin poem that reads the same subjects from a different perspective. For instance, "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" both explore creation, divinity, and nature, but in very different ways! This outraged tirade against child poverty has just such a cousin: the subtly ironic "Holy Thursday" of Songs of Innocence, in which a softhearted speaker is charmed by the sight of all those sweet orphans on their way to church.
Blake didn't just write poetry: he also designed, engraved, printed, painted, and published illuminated manuscripts using a technique he called the "infernal method." Blake painted his poems and pictures on copper plates with a resilient ink, then burned away the excess copper in a bath of acid—the opposite of the process most engravers used. But then, Blake often did the opposite of what other people did, believing that it was his role to "reveal the infinite that was hid" by custom and falsehood.
Even among the often countercultural Romantics, then, Blake was an outlier. Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself—no stranger to a wild vision—once remarked that he was "in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr. Blake."
While Blake was never widely known during his lifetime, he has become one of the most famous and beloved of poets since his death, and writers from Allen Ginsberg to Olga Tokarczuk to Philip Pullman claim him as a major influence.
Historical Context
William Blake spent much of his life railing against the cruelties of 19th-century British society—and he had plenty to rail against.
The England of Blake's time was just getting caught up in the Industrial Revolution, a period during which the economy shifted from farming to manufacturing. The countryside began to empty out, and the cities began to swell. English class divisions, always intense, began to seem even more pronounced as impoverished workers lived cheek-by-jowl with the fashionable and wealthy in newly crowded towns.
Workers during the early Industrial Revolution got a pretty raw deal. Even young children were forced to work in factories, dig in mines, and sweep chimneys (an absurdly dangerous job, contrary to the cheery Mary Poppins image many are familiar with: chimney-sweeps as young as three or four years old sometimes died of suffocation in narrow flues). Adults didn't have it much easier. With few regulations to keep factory owners in check, bosses could impose impossible working hours or withhold pay for any number of trifling offenses.
Blake's passionate, prophetic stance on humankind's innate divinity made him a fiery critic of the cruelty he saw all around him in the streets of his native London. And Blake was only one in a long series of writers who saw 19th-century working conditions—and the poverty that always threatened workers—as an affront to humanity. Charles Dickens would later make similar protests in novels like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.
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More “Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the actor Toby Jones performing the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Visit the Poetry Foundation's website to find an overview of Blake's life and work.
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Blake's Legacy — Read contemporary novelist Philip Pullman's reflections on what Blake means to him.
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Blake as a Visual Artist — See more images of Blake's wild art (and learn about his artistic philosophy) at the website of London's Tate Gallery.
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The Poem Illuminated — See an image of the poem as Blake intended it to be read: in one of his engraved and hand-painted illustrated manuscripts. It's worth thinking about how the images Blake chooses interact with his language.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake
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