Blake's poem opens with a question that sounds polite and works as an accusation: "Is this a holy thing to see / In a rich and fruitful land, / Babes reduced to misery?" The title points to a festival day in the church calendar, and the verb "see" suggests a scene put in front of onlookers who are invited to feel pious about it. Blake refuses. The question is rhetorical, and the answer is no.
The sharpest phrase comes in the first stanza: the babes are "fed with cold and usurous hand." Usury means lending money at a profit, so the hand that feeds also expects something back. Charity is turned into a transaction, and the word "cold" strips out any warmth. "Babes" is chosen with care too. It names creatures too small to be blamed for their own hunger, which makes the cruelty harder to excuse.
The second stanza turns on the clash between "trembling cry" and "song." The poem asks whether such a sound can be "a song of joy," and its tone says it cannot. Where a service would expect singing, Blake hears only fear and need. The questions then run out of patience, and the stanza ends in a flat exclamation: "It is a land of poverty!" This contradicts the "rich and fruitful land" of the opening. The poem sets abundance and want in the same place, and that contradiction drives the whole argument.
The form helps. The lines are short, around seven or eight syllables, and they chime like a hymn or nursery verse. Blake borrows that sing-song shape and fills it with harsh content. The first and last stanzas rhyme neatly (see/misery, land/hand; shine/there, fall/appall). In the middle, the pairings loosen: "song" and "poor" don't chime, and neither do "shine" and "thorns." It is tempting to hear the neatness fray exactly where the misery is described, though that is an interpretation rather than a certainty.
The third stanza moves from argument to landscape. The poor live where the sun "does never shine," where fields are "bleak and bare" and paths are "filled with thorns." Thorns carry a faint religious echo, perhaps of suffering and sacrifice. The stanza ends with the bleakest phrase in the poem, "eternal winter." Winter normally gives way to spring, and "eternal" removes that hope. In the version printed here the word is spelled "son," which may simply be a misprint for "sun." Even so, the accidental pun is hard to ignore. Light and a son who "never shines" would sit uneasily in a poem about holiness, though that reading is speculation.
The final stanza changes voice. After questions and pictures, Blake states something close to a law of nature and morality: "where'er the sun does shine, / And where'er the rain does fall, / Babes should never hunger there." Sun and rain are the world's free gifts, and wherever they arrive, food should follow. The echo of "shine" from the previous stanza makes the point by contrast: the sun is shining on this land, so the winter must be something people have made. The last line adds that poverty can "appall" the mind. The word suggests horror as well as damage, and it implies that a society which tolerates child hunger is damaged along with its victims.
The poem matters because it is so plain. There are no elaborate metaphors, only short lines, direct questions and a few hard words like "usurous" and "appall." It sits in *Songs of Experience*, the later half of Blake's *Songs of Innocence and of Experience*, and a poem with the same title appears in *Songs of Innocence*, so the two invite comparison. Read alone, the Experience version is a sustained moral protest. It asks whether charity that leaves hunger in place deserves to be called holy, and that question has not gone out of date.