Songs of Experience

by William Blake


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Holy Thursday


A picture for the book Songs of Experience

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery
Fed with cold and usurous 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’er the sun does shine,
And where’er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

Return to the Songs of Experience Summary Return to the William Blake Library

Anton Chekhov
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Susan Glaspell
Mark Twain
Edgar Allan Poe
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Herman Melville
Stephen Leacock
Kate Chopin
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson