HOLY THURSDAYJonathan Cook asks the question, Who sees clearly? in the Innocent Holy Thursday, and determines that the speaker does not. For this reason, Cook goes on to interpret the poem as satiric. The reader must interpret it ironically as well, or he too becomes a victim of its dominant ideology, an ideology whose strongest accusers are the charity children.
According to Linkin, the speaker s blindness stems from a flawed and limited perspective determined by his particular grammatical ideolect. Blake used rhetoric to both strengthen conventional stereotypes and subtly disrupt them. For example, the lack of punctuation in Holy Thursday s last line contributes to an active, questioning reading of the poem. Such incongruities help expose not only the speaker and his society s deception, but also the children's truth.
The specific events described in the Innocent Holy Thursday and their broader social context allow Robert Gleckner to emphasize the satire in the world that the poem s speaker and his words help create. The children manage to subvert a social order that has its roots in greed and selfishness by sitting above their guardians at the church service, but these men are not the only objects of ridicule in Gleckner s 1956 interpretation of the poem. The charity schools and the entire public charity system they represent do not escape condemnation.
Blake s accompanying plate for Holy Thursday , another image of the charity children, produces a similar but more localized reaction in Garber. The stiffly marching children illustrate an abundance of lack, a plethora of emptiness. The urban audience holds this event in highest esteem; but what appears as healthy and appropriate civic duty hides a diseased and corrupted center, a sickness that is unique in its urban context.
This context broadens again in David Erdman s brief comment about Holy Thursday s historical position within the eighteenth century charity school debate.
Bloom returns the irony s focus to the deceived speaker, but he also mentions a certain ambiguity of tone which makes the evidence of satire difficult to collect. He points to the children's clean faces which ought to appear brutalized and to the wands that the beadles must surely use for harsh discipline. Like Gleckner, Bloom places the children above the beadles in wisdom, while emphasizing their inherent, innocent radiance.
Bloom also identifies Holy Thursday with Ascension Day, a misunderstanding Connolly tries to explain. Charity children never paraded through the streets on either Ascension Day or Maundy (Holy) Thursday, but they did almost always gather on a Thursday and more often than annually.
BrianWilkie agrees with the consensus thus far and reads the speaker s attitude as inexcusable because of his naive approach to the children and their plight. Wilkie determines that Holy Thursday s point of view cannot be excused either. While he condemns this speaker s innocent view, other more positive perspectives remain available in the Songs of Innocence. More importantly, the coexistence of the Innocence world and the Experience world as part of a connected whole makes room for a less static interpretation of the poem.
In his second essay referring to Holy Thursday of Innocence, Gleckner begins to develop a system of symbols that he will use later (see Gleckner s 1959 comments) to interpret Blake s Songs. Here he stresses the importance of reading the poem from the Bard s perspective. The beadle s wand is a symbol of regimented authority, but the children s essential freedom and happiness, their innocence despite their guardians control, becomes the poem s true focus. Any other reading would result in either a pleasant but powerless interpretation or an unpleasant, visionless picture. Clearly, the irony remains, but a restricted perspective on the reader s part is equally damaging.
Jackson disagrees with Gleckner s unifying symbols. Such a system in the Songs has faults because many of the poems, including Holy Thursday, do not reflect the Bard s point of view but rather another distinct perspective, and the symbols Gleckner uses are often inconsistent. Jackson persists in his hostile attitude toward the speaker but asserts that there is no method for the reading of Blake s Songs of Innocence. Like Wilkie, he cannot condone a more positive reading of the speaker, but he can resist efforts to systematize that reading, leaving room for more fluid interpretations.
Some additional comments on Holy Thursday in The Piper and the Bard allow Gleckner to further explain the poem s symbols, particularly, the beadle s wand. Again, this restricting device signifies institutionalized authority and enforced moral purity. Gleckner expands the symbol to include father, king, and tyrant figures who hold scepters and command obedience.
Diana HumeGeorge uses this same symbol to describe the suppressed brutality in the Innocent Holy Thursday that becomes outwardly apparent in its Experience counterpart.
Martin Price takes Wilkie and Jackson a step further by noting not only the children s placement above their guardians but the beadles positions as attendants of Angels. He contradicts Cook and others, arguing that Songs of Innocence contains more than simplistic ironies and oppositions.
Leader agrees that a one-dimensional reading of Holy Thursday is not desirable. Instead, he believes that the speaker s attitude toward the children changes from admiration to awe to fear as he realizes the extent of their power (a subject Glen discuses as well). The speaker s own guilt explains his reaction, while his fear produces the moral of the last line. He is an example of eighteenth century conservatism and its need to repress any true, active social power the charity children and the lower classes gain.
For Gillham, however, the speaker s own simplicity validates his response to the procession. He remains unaffected by larger moral issues and pleased at the action taken against poverty. The children fix his attention with the reality of their presence. The Innocent Holy Thursday s succinct moral stresses responsibility s importance, something that is clearly missing in the Experience poem s abstract reasoning.
Gardner turns to society and its practices for his much more hopeful reading of Holy Thursday. Unlike Garber and Gleckner, he concludes that Blake may have supported some charity schools, not condemning them all. This theory together with the positive changes Blake made to the poem s original form in An Island in the Moon ( grey coats become red, blue, green ) create an image that reflects the fulfilled reality of common care. According to Gardner, the accompanying plate depicts relaxed, uninhibited children, walking and talking together, a perspective which directly opposes Garber s view.
Hazard Adams finds flaws in Gardner s opinions as well. He assumes Gardner does not believe the poem has an anti-climactic final line because the poetic tension never lessens; the speaker s eyes never leave the children. But for Adams, this slackening brings the poem its force; it produces the ambiguous tone that Bloom finds so fascinating. To some extent, the reader s experience determines the reading of the poem. An experienced reader may see an equally experienced speaker and deduce satire, while a naive individual may explain the poem in direct and favorable terms.
Adams and Jackson maintain that the speaker s experience influences his verse and the nature of innocence itself. However, Summerfield concludes that Songs of Innocence, including Holy Thursday, differs from other eighteenth century children s literature because the Songs are not about innocence or written for innocent readers, but songs sung by innocence. While Adams and other critics (Linkin, Bloom, Gleckner) can identify innocence with the children and an inexperienced reader, they cannot accept the inherently innocent speaker; Summerfield admits such an individual.
Ginsberg does not find cynicism in Songs of Innocence either, but rather Blake's ability to see the central holiness of multitudinous being. Everyone, the speaker, the children, the guardians, must cherish pity because all are angel[s].
In his interpretation of Holy Thursday, Lindsay combines an experienced reader with an innocent speaker and warns that a strictly satiric reading only acknowledge[es] the less disturbing points of the poem. He encourages the reader to explore Holy Thursday s vision, force, rhythms, and imagery, present in its innocence.
Hirsch makes an attempt to follow Lindsay s suggestion when he compares the action in Holy Thursday with Christ s guardianship of man. The poem becomes a series of biblical allusions (the loaves and fishes, the receiving of the Holy Spirit, and events in the book of Revelation). Earthly guardianship becomes joy in Eternity with the children as sheep and the beadles, their servants.
Holloway s approach to Holy Thursday extends visionary interpretation beyond metaphor. The children rise above the beadles, as they do for Gleckner, Bloom, and Price, but with more compelling force. They become divine with a divine voice. A change in the movement of attention allows the children to push their innocent power up from below rather than feel their guardians (society s) force from above.
In her 1978 essay that includes a discussion of Holy Thursday, Heather Glen explores the speaker s ability to topple the prescribed social order by pushing up from below. In the poem s plate, the children march between rigid lines of text, within social confines. However, Glen discovers, like Lindsay, that Holy Thursday s imagery contradicts a strictly repressive, satiric reading. An a-moral vision of beauty and harmony emerges based on but not confined to the particular scene. The speaker, stimulated by this imagery, frees himself from the life-sucking moral law. The meaning and effect of the poem s last line in this context appears unclear and potentially jarring.
In order to reconcile the last line of Holy Thursday with the rest of her interpretation, Glen turns to the charity children and their potential power. Their overwhelming force drives the speaker and Glen toward a more complete understanding of vision. The class structure upends, and the last line s pity becomes a virtue, not a possession of the social elite. Pity is the Poetic Genius transforming the occasion and reality, demanding active participation in the change. Much like Cook, Glen wants to know, who sees clearly? For Cook true sight exposes cruelty, while for Glen clarity reveals hopeful vision.
Emily Camp (November 1995)
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