Things posted in 2016
William Blake's 1794 "Holy Thursday". Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy F, object 38.
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.William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Oxford University Press, 1977.
O sun, you who heal all troubled sight,
you so content me by resolving doubts
it pleases me no less to question than to know.Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XI 91-93. Translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. Random House, 2003.
O sol che sani ogne vista turbata,
tu mi contenti sì quando ti solvi,
che, non men che saver, dubbiar m’aggrata.Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XI 91-93.
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