A Divine Image - Synopsis and commentary

Cruelty, jealousy, terror and secrecy are abstract ideas but they have no reality apart from human beings. It
is from the heart of human beings that cruelty comes. It is human beings who are jealous, who cause terror,
who create secrecy. Humanity is, therefore, not soft and tender. It is strong like iron. It is as powerful and as
full of potentially destructive, as well as constructive, energy as a forge or a furnace. The human heart is not
soft and tender but a consuming mouth, like that of a beast.

Commentary

This is an additional poem, added to the collection around 1804, after its first publication. It is useful to read
this poem alongside The Divine Image, The Human Abstract and The Tyger, because they all deal with the
same range of ideas.

Blake believed that a complete vision of life, of God and of people could only be obtained if contraries are
held together. The world encompasses the tenderness of the lamb and the ferocity of the tiger. There is fierce
energy at the heart of the world as well as beauty and gentleness. A true divine image must reflect this truth.
If we say that human beings are the image of God, then these ideas must be related to God, too.

This poem, however, reflects the standpoint of experience. It looks at human beings when they have been
corrupted by the ‘mind-forg'd manacles' discussed in London or are dominated by the growth in the human
brain illustrated by The Human Abstract. This produces a distorted and incomplete vision of human beings,
in which all their power and energy is interpreted and expressed in ways which are life-denying and
destructive.

The Divine Image - Imagery, symbolism and themes

Imagery and symbolism

Blake's virtues relate to the Beatitudes which Jesus gave his followers during the Sermon on the Mount. In
these instructions for living, the merciful, the peace-makers and the loving are called the truly blessed, and
promised the reward of eternal life. One way of interpreting these beatitudes is to see them as an illustration
of Jesus himself, so giving us a picture of God.

The qualities of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are also inferred in a famous passage about love from the New
Testament. This describes perfect human love as a gift from God, with the implication that these qualities
are attributes of God. They also seem to characterise the life of Jesus (and his teaching about God's love and
mercy.

Themes

How the human mind sees the nature of the world and its creator

The poem's speaker suggests that there are only gentle qualities in ‘God, our father dear'; there is no wrath,
fierce energy or anything suggesting power or might. By excluding ‘contrary' dimensions, humans falsify
their understanding of the creator and of the human beings made ‘in his image'. Here, the speaker here can
only see human beings in the light of his/her own partial vision of God.

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God in man's image

A related theme is the role of the human mind in creating a limiting vision of the creator, as a projection of
its own qualities. Here, the innocent speaker can imagine only a tender, gentle creator.

The Divine Image by William Blake: Summary and Critical Analysis

Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are the essential qualities of God. We pray God to these qualities when we are
in distress. Mercy has a kind human heart, pity a human face, love is the human form and peace is the
human dress. Where, mercy, pity, peace and love live, God, too, lives there.

This is one of Blake’s more rhetorical Songs. The speaker praises both God and man while asserting an
identity between the two. “The Divine Image” thus differs from most of the other Songs of Innocence,
which deal with the emotional power of conventional Christian faith, and the innocent belief in a supreme,
benevolent, and protective God, rather than with the parallels between these transcendent realms and the
realm of man.

The poem uses personification to dramatize Christ’s mediation between God and Man. Beginning with
abstract qualities (the four virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love), the poem makes these abstractions the
object of human prayer and piety. The second stanza explains this somewhat strange notion by equating the
virtues with God himself. But the idea is still slightly unorthodox, suggesting as it does that we pray to these
abstract virtues because they are God, rather than praying to God because he has these sympathetic qualities.
The poem seems to emphasize that Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are not God’s characteristics but his
substance—they are precisely what we mean when we speak of God.

The speaker now claims that Mercy, Pity, Peace, Love are also equivalent to Man: it is in humans that these
qualities find a kind of embodiment, and they become recognizable because their features (heart, face, body,
clothes) are basically human. Thus when we think of God, we are modeling him after these ideal human
qualities. And when people pray, regardless of who or where they are, or to what God they think they are
praying, they actually worship “the human form divine”—what is ideal, or most godly, in human beings.
Blake’s “Divine Image” is therefore a reversed one: the poem constructs God in the image of man rather
(whereas, in the Bible, God creates man in his image). The implication that God is a mental creation reflects
Blake’s belief that “all deities reside in the human breast.”

The poem does not explicitly mention Christ, but the four virtues that Blake assigns alternately to man and
God are the ones conventionally associated with Jesus. Because Christ was both God and man, he becomes
the vehicle for Blake’s mediation between the two. But the fact that he is given an abstract rather than a
human figuration underscores the elaborate intellectualization involved in Christian doctrine. Blake himself
favors a more direct identification between what is human and what is divine. Thus the companion poem in
Songs of Experience, “The Human Abstract,” goes further toward exposing the elaborate institutions of
religion as mental confabulations that obscure rather than honor the true identity of God and man.

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Govt. Post Graduate College, SAMNABAD, GOJRA