To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
Summary
The personified figures of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
are listed as the four “virtues of delight.” The speaker states
that all people pray to these in times of distress and thank them
for blessings because they represent “God, our father dear.” They
are also, however, the characteristics of Man: Mercy is found in
the human heart, Pity in the human face; Peace is a garment that
envelops humans, and Love exists in the human “form” or body. Therefore,
all prayers to Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are directed not just
to God but to “the human form divine,” which all people must love
and respect regardless of their religion or culture.
Form
The poem is comprised of five ballad stanzas—quatrains
in which the lines have four and three beats, alternately, and rhyme
ABCB. This stanza form, in English poetry, conveys a sense of candor
and naturalness, and it is common in songs, hymns, and nursery rhymes.
The lilting rhythm and the frequent repetition of words and phrases
combine with a spiritual subject matter to create the poem’s simple,
hymn-like quality.
Commentary
This is one of Blake’s more rhetorical Songs. The
speaker praises both God and man while asserting an identity between
the two. “The Divine Image” thus differs from most of the other Songs
of Innocence, which deal with the emotional power of conventional
Christian faith, and the innocent belief in a supreme, benevolent, and
protective God, rather than with the parallels between these transcendent
realms and the realm of man.
The poem uses personification to dramatize Christ’s mediation
between God and Man. Beginning with abstract qualities (the four
virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love), the poem makes these abstractions
the object of human prayer and piety. The second stanza explains
this somewhat strange notion by equating the virtues with God himself.
But the idea is still slightly unorthodox, suggesting as it does
that we pray to these abstract virtues because they are God, rather
than praying to God because he has these sympathetic qualities. The
poem seems to emphasize that Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are not
God’s characteristics but his substance—they are precisely what
we mean when we speak of God.
The speaker now claims that Mercy, Pity, Peace, Love are
also equivalent to Man: it is in humans that these qualities find
a kind of embodiment, and they become recognizable because their
features (heart, face, body, clothes) are basically human. Thus
when we think of God, we are modeling him after these ideal human qualities.
And when people pray, regardless of who or where they are, or to
what God they think they are praying, they actually worship “the
human form divine”—what is ideal, or most godly, in human beings. Blake’s
“Divine Image” is therefore a reversed one: the poem constructs
God in the image of man rather (whereas, in the Bible, God creates
man in his image). The implication that God is a mental creation
reflects Blake’s belief that “all deities reside in the human breast.”
The poem does not explicitly mention Christ, but the four
virtues that Blake assigns alternately to man and God are the ones
conventionally associated with Jesus. Because Christ was both God
and man, he becomes the vehicle for Blake’s mediation between the
two. But the fact that he is given an abstract rather than a human
figuration underscores the elaborate intellectualization involved
in Christian doctrine. Blake himself favors a more direct identification
between what is human and what is divine. Thus the companion poem
in Songs of Experience, “The Human Abstract,” goes
further toward exposing the elaborate institutions of religion as
mental confabulations that obscure rather than honor the true identity
of God and man.
