Unlike its Songs of Innocence partner, William Blake’s other “Holy Thursday”  poem has no plausible ambiguity in its view of childhood poverty. One reader wrote to remind me that the Songs of Innocence “Holy Thursday”  poem shows a peaceful, happy scene that I misread. They could be right! Allen Ginsberg famously thought Blake appeared to him and instructed the later poet by reading “Ah, Sunflower”  to him, but what instructs me to see undercurrents in the first Holy Thursday poem is reading more about what we believe we know about Blake’s beliefs. Reader Alan also reminds us the two poems’ connections should be examined — and that’s what I’ll do today, along with sharing a performance of Blake’s second song about Ascension Day.

As Blake illuminated and printed these two poems. One of the things I always admired about him: he was a self-contained, DIY, artist who learned what he needed to do to manifest his art.

.

Let’s jump to the second poem, the one from Songs of Experience.*   Childhood poverty is an undercurrent in the first — would Blake even expect his readers to know that the children in the first poem are charity cases (many modern readers do not) — but poverty is foreground in the second. Blake takes on the mode of a Biblical prophet in this second poem and charges against the civic and/or religious state pour down from the start of it. Holy Thursday happens in springtime, but it’s “eternal winter” here. Its final stanza is preaching that this is not the natural order, and that in a polity of mankind’s natural state, the Earth’s fecundity would provide food for all.

I’m not sure we invariably think of Blake, for whom a spiritual element is clearly present, as a writer of civic poetry, as a political creature — yet modern scholars have subsequently delved into that element of the poet. Ginsberg, a civic poet of my youth, recognized a fellow civic poet in the prophetic Blake, and to deal with that is not to deny the spiritual element. I myself am no more a fine scholar than I’m a fine musician. In both professions, I’m simply and old man who does what he can in those fields haphazardly because he cannot wait longer at this point in my life to perfect those arts.

How do I currently think the two “Holy Thursday”  poems connect? I don’t want to put words into Alan’s mouth, he’s likely sharper than I can draw him, but he or others may believe that first poem is happy, innocent children in safe, supportive clerical care, uttering praise to their religious saviors/supervisors and that institution’s godhead and nation. And the second poem? Perhaps either a progression or another facet degraded from that? I’d say there’s no reason not to think that the two poems are happening at the same time in the same Britain — so, the two situations simultaneously comment on each other. The wards in the first poem may live better than the utter misery of the poor in the second, but they are part of the same civic system, the same “land of poverty.”  The thunder within the ward’s song that ascends briefly to heaven in the first, is the fecund rain that feeds all in the yet to be manifested world of the second. I’d summarize that Blake thinks that poverty and its partial charitable mitigations aren’t in opposition, but rather that poverty is a civic construction like the imperfect charity schools were. What Blake sees as opposition (in both poems) would be some Rosseauian natural state as the proper order of society. Yes! I realize that’s idealistic, that’s there’s no actual political party or plan ready to implement such an Eden. You can call it a fantasy. You’ll have good arguments to do so.

In my country, in my time, we’re at one of those political moments where forces in power wish to remind us that the poor are a disreputable burden, feeding off the productive citizens, wasting our resources of freedom and pleasure. You can call that a fantasy too. You’ll have good arguments to do so. But unlike the former view, this one’s on offer, even in the process of being implemented.

I’ve “progressed” from acoustic guitar to electric guitar in today’s “Holy Thursday,”  along with piano and percussion. You can hear it with the audio player below, or if that player is obscured in a field of thorns, you can get a rain check with this alternative highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Text linked here in case the picture of Blake’s original illuminated plate is too hard to make out.