“Holy Thursday” (Songs of Experience) by William Blake
Read by Toby Jones
Sung by Victor Vertunni
Here’s the text from the Poetry Foundation. And here is the companion poem “Holy Thursday” (Songs of Innocence.)
And somehow, Thomas Piketty, author of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, seems germane here, too.
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These are (as the one in Songs of Innocence makes clearer) poems about a ritual practice of Ascension Day, not Maundy Thursday. Cf. David Perkins, ed., English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 54: “Holy Thursday is Ascension Day . . . . Each year thousands of children from the charity schools of London were marched to a service in St. Paul’s Cathedral.”