To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. William Blake* (1757-1827). First published in Songs of Innocence (1789) as ‘The Divine Image’, an engraved poem with a flame running from earth to heaven. Its opposite is ‘The Human Abstract’ in ‘Songs of Experience’, in which the human brain is chained to the ground. In the present poem the divine qualities are found in human form, as the ‘divine image’ is found in the human qualities of mercy, pity, peace and love. This has affinities with Swedenborgian doctrine, in which God is the Divine Man. The repeated phrase ‘the human form divine’ (stanza 3 line 3; stanza 4 line 3) is an echo of John Milton*’s Paradise Lost, Book III, in which the poet laments his...