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    This three sentence summary provides the key details and analysis of William Blake's short lyric poem "The Divine Image": The poem suggests that the image of God is reflected in all human beings, not just Christians, and that when people are distressed they seek help from divine qualities like mercy, pity, peace and love. Blake writes in a simple, clear style to imply we are all children in God's eyes. The second stanza builds on this idea by suggesting an essential unity between man and God, as we are created in God's image and embody qualities like mercy, pity, peace and love.

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    This three sentence summary provides the key details and analysis of William Blake's short lyric poem "The Divine Image": The poem suggests that the image of God is reflected in all human beings, not just Christians, and that when people are distressed they seek help from divine qualities like mercy, pity, peace and love. Blake writes in a simple, clear style to imply we are all children in God's eyes. The second stanza builds on this idea by suggesting an essential unity between man and God, as we are created in God's image and embody qualities like mercy, pity, peace and love.

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    518 views1 page

    The Divine Image

    Uploaded by

    Anonymous pfqLBl0Fh
    This three sentence summary provides the key details and analysis of William Blake's short lyric poem "The Divine Image": The poem suggests that the image of God is reflected in all human beings, not just Christians, and that when people are distressed they seek help from divine qualities like mercy, pity, peace and love. Blake writes in a simple, clear style to imply we are all children in God's eyes. The second stanza builds on this idea by suggesting an essential unity between man and God, as we are created in God's image and embody qualities like mercy, pity, peace and love.

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    The Divine Image

    William Blake, 1757 - 1827


    To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
    All pray in their distress: Is God, our father dear:
    And to these virtues of delight And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
    Return their thankfulness. Is Man, his child and care
    For Mercy has a human heart, Then every man of every clime,
    Pity, a human face: That prays in his distress,
    And Love, the human form divine, Prays to the human form divine,
    And Peace, the human dress. Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

    And all must love the human form, Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell,
    In heathen, Turk, or Jew. There God is dwelling too

    Summary and Analysis


    The Divine Image is a short lyric by the English Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827).
    As its title implies, the poem suggests that the image of God is reflected in human beingsnot
    simply in Christian human beings but rather in all of humankind.

    The poem opens by stressing, in its first two lines, a major theme of the work: All people (2),
    when distressed, seek help from such divine qualities as Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love (1).
    When afflicted by sorrow of any kind, people tend to express their thanks for the positive
    qualities in their lives, which they tend to associate with God. The opening stanza implies a kind
    of harmonious reciprocity, in which God gives us the Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love we seek,
    while we, in turn, return our thanks for these gifts.

    The opening stanza, like the rest of the poem, is written in the simple, clear, accessible style
    Blake often used in his lyrics, especially those contained in the Songs of Innocence and
    Experience. (His more epic poems, by contrast, are often highly arcane and confusing.) Poems
    such as The Divine Image, however, are often childlike in their phrasing. They implicitly
    remind us that we are all children in Gods eyes, and so the poems speak in lucid, uncomplicated
    ways that almost anyone can understand. In this poem, the lines are relatively short (consisting of
    alternating eight and six syllables), and the refrain also helps give the poem the effect of
    simplicity and accessibility.

    The speaker addresses the reader without pomp or self-important pretension, and the poems
    rhythms are almost completely iambic: unaccented odd syllables are followed by accented even
    syllables (as in To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love). In addition, the stanzas are exactly the
    same length. In short, nothing in the poem creates any difficulty for most readers: the diction is
    simple, the syntax is simple, the structure and meter are simple, and the poem is as clear today as
    it was on the day it was written. In a poem celebrating the instincts all human beings supposedly
    share, all these stylistic traits are important.

    The second stanza builds on the first by suggesting the essential unity between man and God: we
    are created in Gods image and thus, in our best qualities, we quite literally embody God, just as
    God himself is the personification, the very essence and source, of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and
    Love. Even the words Blake associates with God are clear, simple, short, and straightforward,
    not long or elaborate. Imagine how different the poem would sound if the speaker had tried to
    define God as Clemency, Benevolence,...

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