On a holy day, thousands of London's poor children walk two by two into St Paul's Cathedral behind old beadles, and their singing rises to heaven while the aged guardians sit beneath them.
How Blake's rhyming couplets, images of flowers, lambs and angels, and contrast between the radiant children and the old men who control them question the charity the poem seems to celebrate.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'their innocent faces clean', 'The children walking two and two', 'Grey-headed beadles walked before', 'wands as white as snow', 'these flowers of London town', 'with radiance all their own', 'multitudes of lambs', 'like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song', 'wise guardians of the poor', 'Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door'.
Form: three quatrains of rhyming couplets in long, lilting lines, moving from the procession to the seated children and their song, with near-rhymes such as town and own, song and among, and a last line that turns to warn the reader.
Context: William Blake (1757–1827), the London engraver, painter and poet who printed his own books and finished their pictures by hand; Songs of Innocence (1789), joined in 1794 by Songs of Experience, whose own Holy Thursday sees babes 'reduced to misery' in 'a rich and fruitful land'; Blake's friendship with radicals such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft and his satire of church and state; and the first printed comment on the poem, in 1806, which read it straight, as a scene of 'national munificence and charity'.
OCR set this poem in June 2024 beside Lotte Kramer's Lunch, on young and old set against each other: nearly everyone saw the contrast, but few noticed the sarcasm of 'wise guardians' or the warning in 'cherish pity', a few read the white wands as innocence rather than a threat, and some assumed the unseen poem shared Blake's view.
Links within the cluster: Out, Out— and Venus's-flytraps (adults who fail the young), Tea With Our Grandmothers (the old as guardians of the young) and Theme for English B (education, privilege and the poor).
Beside an unseen poem: compare how each presents the adults in charge of the young, and check whether the unseen shares Blake's judgement or sees age more kindly.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
