HOLY THURSDAY

Yale Center for British Art

Songs of Innocence, Plate 19, (E 13) 
"HOLY THURSDAY          

Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
   
O what a multitude they seemd these flowers of London town 
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands
   
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song 
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor 
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door"

Holy Thursday is the first of the three poems which Blake wrote in Island in the Moon and later included in Songs of Innocence. It is a link between Blake's musings on various subjects which he expressed in Island in the Moon and his concerted effort to present the complex view of the world which occupied his mind and took form in his illuminated books. 

On page 237 of Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye tells us that:
"The Songs of Experience are satires, but one of the things that they satirize is the state of innocence. They show us the butcher's knife which is waiting for the unconscious lamb. Conversely, the Songs of Innocence satirize the state of experience, as the contrast they present to it make its hypocrisies more obviously shameful. Hence the two contrary states of the soul, and in their opposition there is a double-edged irony, cutting into the tragedy and the reality of fallen existence."

We could hardly think that Holy Thursday represented naked innocence. After all these are orphan children marching into the cathedral under the supervision of beadles. The children themselves are innocent: their faces are innocent as are their hands. But we are left with questions about "Grey headed beadles" who "walkd before with wands as white as snow" and the "aged men wise guardians of the poor." Is it enough that the children "raise to heaven the voice of song?" Testimony to the neglect and abuse of London's children in Blake's day is abundant.

The type of satire of which Frye writes is explained in the article on Menippean Satire in Wikipedia:
"Critic Northrop Frye said that Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer, etc. Frye observed that, The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect."