Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1826)/Songs of Experience/Holy Thursday

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.