Songs of Innocence and of Experience Summary and Analysis

"The Divine Image"

Summary

Here Blake expresses his belief in the divinity of human nature. Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are divine attributes to which man may attain. Therefore, if a man perfects any or all of these virtues, he is in that regard divine. Blake echoes his statement in “The Lamb” that Christ the Lamb “became a little child.” Here, Love has a “human form divine,” and Pity wears “a human face,” while “Mercy has a human heart” and “Peace, the human dress.” Just as Christ in his divinity became human, so humans, insofar as they possess these holy attributes, are divine.

Analysis

"The Divine Image" is a five-stanza poem of mostly ABCB quatrains. The exceptions to this rhyme scheme are stanza 2, in which "Love" is rhymed with itself; and stanza 4, where "clime" and "divine," a word repeated from stanza 3, rhyme. Even the change in pattern to ABAB, the heroic stanza, complements the overall structure of the poem, as each variation is between two "normal" stanzas.

Blake also alludes to his message of "The Divine Image" in “The Little Black Boy” in the final stanza, where he states that “All must love the human form,/In heathen, turk, or jew.” Human beings possess the image of the invisible God because we are created in that image; this divine image is accentuated “where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell” because “there God is dwelling too.”