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?
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.
Summary
The poem begins with a series of questions: how holy is the sight of children
living in misery in a prosperous country? Might the children's "cry," as they
sit assembled in St. Paul's Cathedral on Holy Thursday, really be a song? "Can
it be a song of joy?" The speaker's own answer is that the destitute existence
of so many children impoverishes the country no matter how prosperous it may be
in other ways: for these children the sun does not shine, the fields do not
bear, all paths are thorny, and it is always winter.
Form
The four quatrains of this poem, which have four beats each and rhyme ABAB, are
a variation on the ballad stanza.
Commentary
In the poem "Holy Thursday" from Songs of
Innocence, Blake described the public appearance of charity school children
in St. Paul's Cathedral on Ascension Day. In this "experienced" version,
however, he critiques rather than praises the charity of the institutions
responsible for hapless children. The speaker entertains questions about the
children as victims of cruelty and injustice, some of which the earlier poem
implied. The rhetorical technique of the poem is to pose a number of suspicious
questions that receive indirect, yet quite censoriously toned answers. This is
one of the poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience that best show
Blake's incisiveness as a social critic.
In the first stanza, we learn that whatever care these children receive is
minimal and grudgingly bestowed. The "cold and usurous hand" that feeds them is
motivated more by self-interest than by love and pity. Moreover, this "hand"
metonymically represents not just the daily guardians of the orphans, but the
city of London as a whole: the entire city has a civic responsibility to these
most helpless members of their society, yet it delegates or denies this
obligation. Here the children must participate in a public display of joy that
poorly reflects their actual circumstances, but serves rather to reinforce the
self-righteous complacency of those who are supposed to care for them.
The song that had sounded so majestic in the Songs of Innocence shrivels,
here, to a "trembling cry." In the first poem, the parade of children found
natural symbolization in London's mighty river. Here, however, the children and
the natural world conceptually connect via a strikingly different set of images:
the failing crops and sunless fields symbolize the wasting of a nation's
resources and the public's neglect of the future. The thorns, which line
their
paths, link their suffering to that of Christ. They live in an eternal
winter,
where they experience neither physical comfort nor the warmth of love. In the
last stanza, prosperity is defined in its most rudimentary form: sun and rain
and food are enough to sustain life, and social intervention into natural
processes, which ought to improve on these basic necessities, in fact reduce
people to poverty while others enjoy plenitude.
