“the sun does never shine/bleak and bare/eternal winter” Blake creates the image of a barren landscape, distorting ideas of the pleasant pastoral that the Romantics revered. Suggesting that the children of London must work hard for nothing in return. The word “ursurous” pertains to the idea of lending someone money with a high interest rate. By asking rhetorical questions of the reader, Blake makes them feel complicit in the mistreatment of the poor.īlake contrasts “a rich and fruitful land” with “misery” and “usurous”, reminding us that the world is plentiful but wealth is not divided fairly. The interrogative mood is also used in this poem, where it wasn’t in the other. This creates an uncomfortable sense of closure at the end of the poem, as it comes to a natural finish, though we know the theme itself is not resolved. The rhyme scheme begins to build up a gain to abcb in the final two stanzas. The first stanza is a/b/a/b, but this breaks down in the second stanza, which emphasises the exclamatory “It is a land of poverty” at the end of the stanza. This poem has a fragmented rhyme scheme which contrasts with the other Holy Thursday. This is because it tells the tale of ordinary people. The poem is variation of a ballad form, which is known as common metre. In songs of Experience, Blake is basically just criticising all the ills of society.

This one is a lot more explicit about what it’s trying to say than the other one, so hopefully it means less revision.

Songs of experience poem