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William Blake - Coggle Diagram

- - - - This poem’s outraged speaker sounds a lot like William Blake himself. Blake made no secret of his horror at his society’s evils. Songs of Experience is only one of many works in which he takes a rumbling, prophetic stand against injustice, poverty, and cruelty, especially where they hurt children.
    - - "Holy Thursday" is set, as its title suggests, on Holy Thursday—a Christian religious holiday just before Easter which commemorates the Last Supper. This was a day focused on humility and service. Churchgoers on Holy Thursday often performed a ritual foot-washing in imitation of Christ, who was said to have humbly washed the Apostles' feet before that final meal.
    - - With its four short quatrains (four-line stanzas) in homespun accentual meter, the poem looks and sounds like a nursery rhyme.
        But while some nursery rhymes are certainly bleak or eerie, few make such an unguarded and impassioned social critique as this poem does. Here, the forceful simplicity of Blake's form conveys his rage over what he feels to be a painfully, appallingly straightforward point:
  - - - poem has three stanzas, each containing two rhymed couplets. The lines are longer than is typical for the collection, and their extension suggests the train of children processing toward the cathedral, or the flowing river to which they are explicitly compared.