Holy Thursday By William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Although relatively unrecognised during his lifetime, he is now considered to be one of the most influential figures in the history of poetry.  Most of his work seems to embody the body of God or the human existence itself. ‘Holy Thursday’, one of his many works of poetry, is about the religious ceremony of Holy Thursday; however the poem seems to focus more on the social and economic issues of society as a whole. The poem was written around the time of the Industrial Revolution in England, which was a time of poverty and hunger. The standards of living of many people dropped and many people were forced to live on the streets. His experiences with the Industrial Revolution may have been the inspiration for this poem.

The line ‘In a rich and fruitful land’, in the first stanza, refers to the many material possessions that a country like England has with the word ‘rich’ and the word fruitful could refer to the production and agriculture that are present. A country like England has access to many resources that can help it grow and develop as a nation, however, children are reduced to living on the streets, and this is evident in the line ‘babes reduced to misery’. Juxtaposition is also used in this stanza to contrast the lines ‘in a rich and fruitful country’ and ‘fed with cold and usurious hand?’, this continues on with Blake’s questioning society and its virtues. In the next stanza Blake’s anger seems to come through more than his disbelief. He seems to be shocked that the children that were mentioned just in the last stanza are forced to sing praises to God, songs of joy, at the Holy Thursday ceremony. Blake expresses this shock with the line, ‘is that trembling cry a song?’. He is asking the responder if what he is hearing is a song because so many of the children are crying at once that it sounds like a song. Blake also suggests that England is a land of poverty in this poem. Even thought England is a nation of wealth and prosperity, there are such a large number of children that are living in terrible conditions, and even some living on the streets, it almost seems like a whole nation. This is why Blake says ‘it is a land of poverty’; he is referring to the massive amount of childhood homelessness.

The next stanza of Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’ is a little more dark and depressing. In this stanza he uses lines like ‘their sun does never shine’ and ‘their fields are bleak and bare’. These lines have connotations of depression and sorrow. In this stanza Blake suggests that England is a land of ‘eternal winter’. This statement is supported by the references to the sun not shining and the bleakness of the landscape. In the next stanza the tone changes again. Blake says that in a land where the sun shines and the rain falls is the land that is not affected by poverty and children don’t go hungry. This land is clearly not England because in the previous stanza it is referred to as having  an ‘eternal winter’ and obviously in the cold, snowy winter of England the sun does not shine and the rain does not fall, instead it snows.

Overall, I think the message of ‘Holy Thursday’ by William Blake is that the physical landscape of England during the Industrial Revolution affects the inhabitants because children are poverty stricken and forced to live on the streets. This then affect the inner landscape of the inhabitants as it changes the way they view the world and they may never fully recover form that traumatic experience.

A.D. Hope’s ‘Australia’ can be compared to ‘Holy Thursday’ as both poems seem to contradict the way people view the environment. However, differences between these two poems can be seen as Hope suggests that the landscape is being changed and altered because of society’s greed. Whereas, in ‘Holy Thursday’, the poet is suggesting that unequal distribution of rights and resources, due to the affects of the Industrial Revolution, is what is destroying the inhabitant’s inner landscape.

My annotated version of Holy Thursday