1794 ‘Holy Thursday’, or Maundy Thursday, which fell on this date in 1794, commemorates the day of the Last Supper. Throughout the history of the church it has been marked by archbishops and monarchs giving alms to the poor – even washing their feet, as Jesus did those of his disciples on that night.
The short poems collected in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) juxtapose (as he put it) ‘two contrary states of the human soul’. So the ‘Introduction’ to the first is largely innocent of declarative verbs, using gerunds and imperatives like ‘Piping’, ‘pipe’, ‘Sing’ and ‘write’. The message moves only gradually into articulacy, from the wordless tune, through ‘songs of happy cheer’, only finally to writing – and even that ‘stain[s] the water clear’.
By contrast the ‘Introduction’ to the latter is the ‘voice of the bard! / Who Present, Past & Future sees, whose ears have heard / The Holy Word / That walk’d among the ancient trees’ – and so on down through three further levels of relative clause. It’s a voice that speaks of wisdom, but also authority: subordination in politics as well as syntax.
There’s a ‘Holy Thursday’ in both Innocence and Experience, both about the orphans of the foundling hospital making their annual procession to St Paul’s Cathedral. The first is seen through innocent eyes, the verse child-like, the scene rendered through surface phenomena only:
’Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two in red and blue and green,
Grey headed beadles walk’d before with wands as white as snow;
Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow.
By contrast, the second ‘Holy Thursday’ is analytical, introducing the contexts of economics, politics and morality:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
And whereas the children in the first poem ‘raise to heaven the voice of song’ like a ‘mighty wind’, those in Experience utter only a ‘trembling cry’:
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And that poverty is not just the absence of riches, but poverty of intellect and wit, hope and aspiration too.