Manning 1

John Manning

Prof. Faubert

English 2130

October 16th, 2020

Naïve and Educated speakers in the poem Holy Thursday

Names are important. Some names are important because they define who we are. Other names

are important because they define what something is. Imagine trying to discuss the latest sporting event

without team names. Or, imagine trying to recommend a novel to a friend if books didn’t have titles.

Imagine trying to study biology without names for the flora and fauna of our world. Names are vital to

our identities, which is why, when a poet names two separate poems the same thing, it’s significant.

William Blake’s companion poems “Holy Thursday” and “Holy Thursday” are inextricably linked by

their shared name, and taking into consideration the method in which they were published, as well as

commonalities in their imagery, I would argue that they are actually the same poem.

In this essay, for simplicities sake, the speaker from the Songs of Innocence poem will be referred

to as the “naïve speaker” and the Songs of Experience speaker as the “educated speaker”. Blake’s Songs

of Innocence and Songs of Experience had a curious publishing quirk – the Songs of Experience were

never published separately from the Songs of Innocence. Blake’s ideas around what he called “Innocence”

and “Experience” contained the notion that, to be in Experience, first you had to have been in Innocence.

As such, it makes a lot of sense that Blake would want readers to experience Songs of Innocence before

reading the Songs of Experience. The Songs of Experience cannot exist without the Songs of Innocence.

However, that means that we cannot analyse poems from the Songs of Experience without relating them

back to the poems from Songs of Innocence, especially if the poems share a name.
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If we can’t read the second “Holy Thursday” without considering the first, then the questions and

claims made by the educated speaker of the poem can be interpreted differently. Without context, the

verse “Is that a trembling cry a song?” () reads like the educated speaker’s inner musings. However, with

the knowledge that it part of a set of poems, the verse reads like a direct response to the naïve speaker’s

claim that “they raise to heaven the voice of song.”() . The naïve speaker watches the procession and

compares the children to “flowers of London town”, () with “radiance all their own” and calls them

“lambs”. The educated speaker retorts, saying “And their sun does never shine./And their fields are bleak

& bare./And their ways are fill'd with thorns.”() He is saying that while they might have radiance, it

doesn’t shine. They might be flowers, but London is a barren field. They might be lambs, but the lamb of

God was sacrificed wearing a crown of thorns. The educated speaker is arguing with the worldview of the

naïve speaker. Interpreted this way, the last stanza takes on a derisive tone. For where-e'er the sun does

shine, / And where-e'er the rain does fall: / Babe can never hunger there, / Nor poverty the mind

appall.”() He’s summarizing the perfect image that the naïve speaker presents, as if pointing out how silly

it is to see the world this way.

Naming something isn’t a simple decision. For a poet like Blake, who was so dedicated to the

presentation of his art that he included a full page illustration alongside each poem, and ensured that the

Songs of Experience would never be published on its own, it’s not difficult to imagine that the names of

his poems carried meaning as well. Having two poems share a name forces us to imagine them in tandem,

and the similarities in the imagery are too apparent for it to be unintentional. What I find curious,

however, is that while the educated speaker mocks the optimism of the naïve speaker, both are spectators

at Holy Thursday.