The Divine Image
Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And Jealousy a Human Face;
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy the Human Dress.
The Human Dress is forged Iron,
The Human Form a fiery Forge,
The Human Face a Furnace seal'd,
The Human Heart is hungry Gorge.
Commentary
Blake is in full Apocalypse Mode here, all fire and fury and righteous indignation. In a lesser poet it would be pretentious; in Blake, it’s amazingly, indisputably right.
— Thomas
[Et cetera]
There are poets who are inextricably linked with particular forms and metres; for example, Longfellow1, Yeats2 and yes, William Blake3.
By the shore of Gitchie Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,
In the pleasant Summer morning,
Hiawatha stood and waited.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Hiawatha’s Departure”, Poem #362
See Poem #559, “The Modern Hiawatha”, by George A. Strong, for a fairly nice example of a Hiawatha parody.
Minstrels Links
Other poems by William Blake:
Poem #26, “Jerusalem”
Poem #66, “The Tyger”
Poem #97, “The Fly”
Poem #368, “Auguries of Innocence”
Poem #546, “The Sick Rose”
Administrivia
The email I sent a few hours ago titled “The Month in Comments: March 2001” should have been titled “The Month in Comments: April 2001”. An entirely pardonable lapse, caused solely by this reviewer’s occasional ignorance of day, month, and, indeed, year.
As you may have noticed, there has been a preponderance of guest poem submissions recently (and a corresponding paucity of commentary from Martin and myself). This is because we’ve both been travelling and/or busy; we hope to return you to your scheduled service soon.
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See the often celebrated and even more often parodied “Song of Hiawatha”: ↩
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See, especially, the third and final section of Auden’s elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Poem #50) for an excellent tribute in the form that the Master made his own. ↩
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Many of the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” are written in the same metre as today’s poem, as is “Auguries of Innocence”. See http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/blake02.html for the complete set of the former, and Poem #368 on the Minstrels website for the latter. ↩
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
JeffKathMerrick · 8 July 2002
There are 2 distinctive poems by William Blake on the topic of divine image. The 8-line poem on your web page is mistitled. It should be: A Divine Image not The Divine Image. Both were written by Blake. Research further and you’ll find your error. Good Luck! Kathy Merrick
English Teacher
96ORJD-DYER · 27 January 2003
This poem is titled “A Divine Image”, not “The Divine Image”. The latter title is a poem in “Songs of Innocence”, not the poem shown here which is from “Songs of Experience”. Just thought you might like to know.
Alison MacDermott · 26 December 2005
This poem is not titled “The Divine Image.” It is titled “A divine image” and is the counterpart of another poem, from Songs of Innocence, entitled “The Divine Image.”