Holy Thursday Experience – William Blake
* Although charity is usually seen as a good thing, Blake represents it as an unholy miserly and degrading distribution of care from God’s representatives.
* Rather than extending freedom to the poor, it becomes yet another means by which they are unable to escape from the system.
* Guardians of the poor children are the embodiment of evil restriction
* The perspective in ‘Holy Thursday’ experience is much darker than the counterpart poem. The tone is set in the opening line, often questioning the outrageous system of charity which contains the children, and questioning the hypocritical un-Christian religion which refuses to help them. It is far less descriptive than Holy Thursday (Innocence), but it still raises questions of the speaker's attitude and tone, particularly as to the status of the final lines as it questions if this is the speaker's vision of the after-life, or an ironic portrait of the vision of Heaven which is being offered to the children at this service?
* "Holy Thursday" consists of four quatrains. The first is a heroic quatrain (ABAB) but the remaining three vary. The second stanza strikes discord by having no rhyme (ABCD, although there may be an intended slant rhyme for "joy" and "poverty" in their spelling). The last two follow the ABCB pattern. This irregularity contributes to the poem's tone of decay and confusion as the subject matter, the exploitation and neglect of children, becomes clear to the reader.
* PLAN=
Introduction – What was happening around the time of the creation of this poem?
Paragraph 1 – TS= with little care shown towards them from the Church, the first stanza really questions the Church and what they are doing towards the children.
Paragraph 2 – TS= the children have little enthusiasm towards anything; this is shown heavily on how they sing in stanza 2.
Paragraph 3 – TS= living in poorly conditions, the children start to go into an...