The Human Abstract The title and the last stanza of this poem make it clear that the

tree described here is a symbol of an "abstract" quality found in "the human brain". This is less easy to understand than the evil of anger, which Blake explains in A Poison Tree, but again the poet is aware of the "Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" and the "Mystery" (Stanza 4) of the tree which "bears the fruit of deceit", and in which the Raven, the omen of death, "his nest has made". The poem's opening reminds us of Jesus words to Judas Iscariot (John's Gospel, Chapter 12, verse 8): "the poor always ye have with you". What was meant by Jesus as a shrewd comment on poverty (that it will never wholly go away) has been taken by some readers of the gospels to be a kind of universal law: that there must be losers if there are also to be winners, and Blake states this idea in his opening couplet: that "pity" (compassion, a good thing) depends on there being some people who are "poor". The key word here is "make" - as if we force people into poverty so that they can receive our "pity". Instead of a fair society, the rich give handouts to the poor, and feel smug about doing so. In the same way, happiness is not allowed to be universal, or no-one would need "Mercy". Blake may be merely describing the way things are. If he is suggesting how things ought to be, then he does so ironically: he certainly does not approve of this inequality. The ideas in this first stanza are clearly relevant to our own times, but would have been thought very shocking in Blake's time, when British society was organised on principles of clear inequality.
Back to top

In the four central stanzas, Blake's argument becomes less clear, but a number of things are worthy of note: that "peace", usually a good thing, may be the result of "mutual fear" (Blake anticipates in a single line the modern idea of deterrence - that peace is achieved by would-be enemies living in fear of each other), and how, in "The Human Abstract", good things like "holy fears", "tears" and "Humility", are mixed up with wickedness - "mutual fear", "the selfish loves" and "cruelty" - in "the dismal shade/Of Mystery". Cruelty, as he "knits a snare" or "spreads his baits" is likened to a pitiless hunter (snares and baits would be used to catch small game; "his" suggests a person, not an abstraction) while the idea of sickness or corruption is suggested by the "Catterpiller and Fly" which "Feed on the (tree of) Mystery". As in A Poison Tree there is attractive fruit, though we do not know who is to eat it. The "thickest shade", where the "Raven" nests, suggests the secrecy and obscurity of the "Human Abstract" here described. The final stanza gives us the key to the poem: the "Gods" sought "in vain" in the natural world for such a tree, but the poet knows it is found "in the Human Brain" - that its existence is real, but metaphorical, rather than literal. The tree and its fruit suggest particularly the tree, in Genesis, of the knowledge of good and evil: as man has eaten the fruit of this tree, so he has gained this forbidden knowledge, which is particularly the subject of the poem's first two stanzas. This poem is hard to understand in its entirety, but rewards close study. It contains some striking images, and the opening stanza is a challenging statement of the problems faced by those who want to create a fair society - or, perhaps, of the reasons why a fair society will never be realised. The poem obviously has much in common with A Poison Tree in Blake's choice of central metaphor, and in how this image is developed to symbolise, in complex

ways, truths about human nature which would be less clear and interesting if explained in abstract terms. Introduction The notes which follow are intended for study and revision of a selection of Blake's poems. About the poet William Blake was born on 28 November 1757, and died on 12 August 1827. He spent his life largely in London, save for the years 1800 to 1803, when he lived in a cottage at Felpham, near the seaside town of Bognor, in Sussex. In 1767 he began to attend Henry Pars's drawing school in the Strand. At the age of fifteen, Blake was apprenticed to an engraver, making plates from which pictures for books were printed. He later went to the Royal Academy, and at 22, he was employed as an engraver to a bookseller and publisher. When he was nearly 25, Blake married Catherine Bouchier. They had no children but were happily married for almost 45 years. In 1784, a year after he published his first volume of poems, Blake set up his own engraving business. Many of Blake's best poems are found in two collections: Songs of Innocence (1789) to which was added, in 1794, the Songs of Experience (unlike the earlier work, never published on its own). The complete 1794 collection was called Songs of Innocence and Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Broadly speaking the collections look at human nature and society in optimistic and pessimistic terms, respectively - and Blake thinks that you need both sides to see the whole truth.
Back to top

Blake had very firm ideas about how his poems should appear. Although spelling was not as standardised in print as it is today, Blake was writing some time after the publication of Dr. Johnson's authoritative Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Many of Blake's spellings which seem odd or old-fashioned to us, must have struck his readers, too, as quaint. Blake similarly used non-standard forms of punctuation, especially using the ampersand (&) in place of the word "and" (today this is only normal in business names). In keeping with his profession, Blake did not print his poems in type, but engraved them (like handwriting) on an illustrated background. The printed copies were then coloured by hand: Blake was an artist in words and pictures. In some modern editions for students (such as the AQA Anthology, used by people taking GCSE exams in England), the spelling and punctuation have been modernised in standard forms; type replaces handwriting and no pictures appear - you should look at copies of the poems as Blake produced them, in order to decide whether this is a good or bad thing. The poet's method Blake's narratives, simply as stories, are very nave and childlike. But they tell of profound and universal experiences or ideas. We worry about children who really get lost - and any young child has fears (perhaps made stronger by parents' warnings) of being lost or separated from mother or father.

The two poems thus form a narrative in two parts - being lost and being found. It also contrasts the way that human parents fail with God's power and love in caring for children. There is a very similar but much more detailed story in Chapter 7 of The Wind in the Willows ("The Piper at the Gates of Dawn") where little Portly the otter is lost but restored to his worried parents with the help of the animals' god, Pan. Blake does not use metaphors - where something in the poem represents some other thing, usually an abstraction, in a one-to-one way. Rather he uses symbols - and leaves it to the reader to decide what they mean. So we may understand God in the poem as being more or less the same as in Genesis, or, very differently, as the divine element in good people who look after children. And we may see the poem as being about a real child getting lost in a fen, or about the way in which generally, we are unsure about the world and our place in it. The poems are very short - each has only two stanzas, and the pair together have a mere 16 lines. Although the narrative seems to be stripped down to its essentials, there is room for some suggestive details - so we read

that God is "in white", that the "vapour" (mist, presumably) flies away, that a "wandering light" leads the child and that he is lost in a fen, while his mother seeks him in a dale.

With this poet, we can never quite be sure how far these things are intentional and how far they are simply suggested by the need for a rhyme - but it is wiser to suppose that Blake means exactly what he says (or writes) in the Songs of Innocence and Experience.