Willow Murray
In his poetry, Blake presents wealth and power as a corruptive force.
To what extent do you agree with this view?
Blake presents a bleak world under the oppression of the church; he protests against organised religion as
a force that corrupts the lives being lead underneath it.
In Blake’s poetry, the issue of power is often raised and in that arises the issue of wealth; the rising of the
Church and organized religion was protested against by Blake who believed that it was an oppressive
force, abusing the power that it was given. The Church became empowered through a wealth of
obedience, through funding and following, the 18th Century underwent an extreme rise in Christianity and
the organized church, eventually becoming a wealthy and dominant institution amidst the lives of the
people. Blake portrays the Church as a consumer of its ignorant followers, the common people, who are
given ‘holy fears’ and assimilated with animals, ‘the caterpillar’ and ‘the fly,’ this dehumanization and
belittling metaphor is perhaps Blake depicting how small man becomes underneath the power of the
Church. In the Human Abstract the ‘holy fears’ suggest the control of the church in its followers, and the
metaphorical ‘dismal shade’ it places over them that deprives people of individual understanding. Blake
presents the followers of the church as those that ‘feed on the mystery,’ a metaphor that alludes to people
becoming consumers of the indoctrination of the church, and in turn, presents an idea that it is therefore
the church that gains from their consumption. The chruch is a force that oppresses its followers into
believing they have no other choice but to obey its teachings, and as long as they are followed, the church
can continue to grow in wealth and power. Blake somewhat presents his reader with a paradox, where the
culpability of the church’s power is conflicting, whilst the church controls the people, the people, in some
regard, allow themselves to be controlled. The capitalized ‘Pity,’ ‘Peace,’ and ‘Love’ are creations by the
church that Blake argues would not be needed if it were not for the painful sufferings caused by religion,
‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make somebody poor.’ Blake emphasizes that the church is
responsible for their plighting of lives, but also implies in his pronoun of ‘we’ that the reader has some
level of complicity in allowing this suffering. Perhaps, it is wilful ignorance or a desperation to conform
that is the cause for corruption, the allowing by the people to be part of a system, despite knowing its
wrongs.
This complicit behaviour is continued in the adults who willingly blind themselves from the struggles of
the children in Holy Thursday, Blake even ends the poem shaming his reader, ‘Then cherish pity, lest you
drive an angel from your door.’ The use of the verb ‘pity’ continues this motif of ‘pity’ as a creation by
the church, an emotion created so that people could be spectators of plight without intervening, they could
pity the children rather than helping them – which would be acting against the ‘beadles’ or ‘the priests in
