Lee, Bernallyn

LI150
Task: Write a literary analysis essay that examines some aspect of one or more poems.
For more guidance, see associated rubric that will be used to grade the submission.
CHOSEN POEM:
Holy Thursday by William Blake
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurious hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,

And their fields are bleak & bare,
And their ways are fill’d with thorns;
It is eternal winter there.

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.
ANALYSIS ESSAY:
Upon dabbling on some research, on what the well-renowned author, William
Blake, derived his inspirations and stimuli to engender this gloomy-themed literature. I
have learned that it is a poem that regards the children of the United Kingdom sitting in
St. Paul’s Cathedral on a Holy Thursday. The inception of the poem opens up by
introducing a series of queries: how holy can a prosperous country be if the children of
the land live in utter misery? Might the children’s “cry,” as they sit assembled in St.
Paul’s Cathedral on Holy Thursday, really be a song? Can it be a song of joy? Answers
were later revealed in the latter parts of the poem. The technicalities generated in the
literature consist of having four quatrains, which have four beats each and rhyme ABAB,
are a variation on the ballad stanza.
 
         In the poem “Holy Thursday” from the Song of Innocence, Blake criticized, rather
than acclaimed, the charity of institutions that were accountable for the children. Blame
for negligence and irresponsibility that mirrors the occurrence of exploitation and
destitution the children had experienced. 
         The speaker responds that the destitute reality of numerous children impoverishes
the country despite the staggering facts that it is as affluent and triumphant as a country
can be in other ways:
” And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak & bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns;
It is eternal winter there.”

         These children had experienced the utter adversities in many forms: The sun does
not shine, for happiness and contentment has never had any place in their unfortunate
situation. Famine never lingered the land but loitered in their stomachs. Hunger was the
first thing they woke up to in the morning and their companion as they sleep in the
evening. All paths are barbed and full of thorns, so to speak. The direction of their lives
was as the long, winding, and branching road. It is just merely lost and purposeless.
Used as a strong metaphor, eternal winter was utilized as a reflection of never-ending
stories of harsh conditions and poverty-induced lives. Winter, in most literary settings, is
occasionally depicted as harshness, gloominess, and mourning. 
 
         The speaker engages inquiries regarding the children as casualties of brutality
and prejudice, some of which the previous poem inferred. The rhetorical strategy of the
poem is to represent various uncertain inquiries that obtain oblique, yet severely
conditioned answers.
In the first stanza, I've discovered that whatever care these children acquire is merely
negligible and hesitantly offered. The "cold and usurious hand" that feeds them was
inspired by exploitation rather than compassion and mercy. 
 
Moreover, the "hand" mirrors the city of London in its entirety, and not just the mundane
caretaker of the children, in a metonymical approach. The whole City of London has a
civic responsibility to the most unfortunate members of the society, yet it delegates or
denies this obligation. In this case, children must participate in an exhibit of gladness
that poorly mirrors their real circumstances, but serves a reinforced self-righteous
complacency of those who are supposed to partake in their nurturance.