Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)
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Holy Thursday was published in William Blake's "Songs of Experience" in 1794. This poem, unlike its contemporary in "Songs of Innocence", focuses more on society as a whole than the Holy Thursday ceremony.
The primary objective of this poem is to question social and moral injustice. In the first stanza, Blake contrasts the "rich and fruitful land" with a "cold and usurous hand" - such contrast questions the virtue of a society where resources are abundant but children are still "reduced to misery".
Comparitively, its companion poem is a lot lighter in tone and more subtle in its questioning - hence the contrasting titles of the volumes in which they are respectively contained (Innocence, Experience).
The meaning of the final stanza is debatable, although one interpretation is that it refers to the world as whole and asserts that there is no justified reason for children (and indeed the poor) to suffer in the developed world.
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