Holy Thursday (E)

Question 1

What is significant about the ‘cold and usurous hand’?

Answer 1

The “cold and usurous hand” that feeds them is motivated more by self-interest than by love and pity. Moreover, this “hand” metonymically represents not just the daily guardians of the orphans, but the city of London as a whole: the entire city has a civic responsibility to these most helpless members of their society, yet it delegates or denies this obligation.

Question 2

What is the central message of both ‘Holy Thursday’ poems?

Answer 2

Here the children must participate in a public display of joy that poorly reflects their actual circumstances, but serves rather to reinforce the self-righteous complacency of those who are supposed to care for them.

Question 3

What is interesting about the children’s relationship with nature?

Answer 3

• The children and the natural world conceptually connect via a strikingly different set of images than in SoI: the failing crops and sunless fields symbolize the wasting of a nation’s resources and the public’s neglect of the future. The thorns, which line their paths, link their suffering to that of Christ. They live in an eternal winter, where they experience neither physical comfort nor the warmth of love.

Question 4

What is the message of the final stanza?

Answer 4

In the last stanza, prosperity is defined in its most rudimentary form: sun and rain and food are enough to sustain life, and social intervention into natural processes, which ought to improve on these basic necessities, in fact reduce people to poverty while others enjoy plenitude.