"Holy Thursday" or the cry against poverty and despair.

William Blake writes when the Industrial Revolution is changing England, destroying the old peasants' lives and starting to lay the foundations of a new society that will replace it. Needless to say, with it, the transition to a new society also brings plenty of suffering and despair:

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery
Fed with cold and usurous hands?

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-e'er the sun does shine
And where-e'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

(William Blake: Canciones de Inocencia y de Experiencia, p. 120)

It is an intrinsic part of Romanticism, of course, although they criticize the negative consequences of modern society in the name of a return to the old ways that will never happen. Theirs is an attitude full of nostalgia.