Between Children’s Day and Christmas this year, we have been pounded with images of children. Twenty of them, six and seven years old, were gunned down in an American school. A seven-year-old Indian living in a foreign country was found to have been abused repeatedly by his parents, and a seven-year-old in India was beaten to death by his teachers. Not isolated incidents but, taken with all those uncounted children killed instantly in war zones and slowly in famines, examples of humanity’s persistent failures.
Civilizations are defined by the widespread, but sadly not unanimous, instinct to protect a child while it is so dependent. Anyone who urges that we “shake off these depressing thoughts” needs only to look at the nearest seven-year-old. How small that representative of our future looks. How trusting. How small.
In the Book of Matthew, chapter 19, verse 14, in the King James translation, Jesus says, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” In modern translations, that verse reads, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”
The verse is cited to comfort grieving families that all children are welcome to God, but it also includes, many Biblical scholars agree, those who are like children, direct and untainted in their vision.
Visionary writers hold fast to their inner child, reliving and powerfully recalling for us the desires and terrors of infancy. In a century in which children often cleaned streets and chimneys and died young, William Blake, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience , wrote about children lost, children found, children cherished by their mothers, and children cold and hungry. Even the Songs of Innocence hint at foreboding and vulnerability.
Among his verses are these lines from ‘Holy Thursday’: “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.”
Songs of Innocence and Experience is best read in a facsimile edition, because the pictures are inseparable from the words. Blake, who made his living from engraving, etched his text and illustrations in reverse on copper sheets and printed from those sheets. He then coloured each copy individually, powerful and ambiguous images of long-limbed women and of children swaddled, reclining on clouds or marching two by two. Atop ‘Holy Thursday’ a child lies fallen or laid out on the grass. A woman, erect and strangely aloof, looks at him. Another woman in the margin sits with two children, all grieving. At bottom lies another fallen child. The colours are indigos, blues and greens.
My facsimile edition is rather small and I have to squint to read the words. I recommend you buy a larger one or ‘Holy Thursday’ may leave your eyes smarting, too.
