'Twas on a holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two in red and blue and green:
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.
O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among:
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
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 and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.
For where'er the sun does shine,
And where'er the rain does fall,
Babes should never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
--William Blake
"I have a baptism to be baptized with, and what pressure I'm under until it is over! Do you suppose that I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, on the contrary: conflict. As a result, from now on in any given house there will be five in conflict, three against two and two against three. Father will be pitted against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."--Luke 12:50-53, SV
I don't know how many of Blakes' poems we discussed in various classes, at least dozens, without ever once talking about how they related to the British class system and the Poor Law. And Blake didn't live long enough to see the worst enlightenment and scientific form of it in the New Poor Law. The one that Darwin said was dangerous because it didn't kill enough of the British poor. The one conservatives would love to recreate here in an even more depraved and murderous form.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had the resources to read what German scholarship had to say about the British class system and the poor law because what I can read leads me to believe it was one of the models that the proto-Nazism of the first two decades of the 20th century and the Nazis rested on. Those certainly rested on the ideas of it filtered through Darwinism into biology.