A Divine Image: a Direct Contrast to the Humanitarian Idealism Essay

In his 1932 article, An Interpretation of Blakes A predict Image, Stephen Larrabee views the entire poem as a direct contrast to the humanitarian idealism (307) of The ecclesiastic Image, with the author making direct line-by-line comparisons of the both. Not until 1959, however, does a critic actually examine Blakes virtues of delight. In his The Piper & the Bard A Study of William Blake, Robert Gleckner traces the psychological roots of each of those virtues, while asserting that Mercy, Pity, and placidity are each a part of, but distinct from, the fourth and greatest virtue Love. Gleckner lastly affirms the human form divine as a composite of all of the four virtues. Gleckner returns in 1961 with a comparison between The bode Image and The Human Abstract. While earlier concerned with The Human Abstract, Gleckner does slip the integrity of humanity and divinity in the four virtues of The forebode Image against the fall into fragmentation of the by and by poem.Gleckner als o dismisses A Divine Image, the poem sometimes equivalenced with The Divine Image, as a work with no subtlety of theme. Another comparison between The Divine Image and The Human Abstract occurs in Harold blossom outs 1963 text, Blakes Apocalypse A Study in Poetic Argument. Here, Bloom asserts the deliberate incompleteness of The Divine Image by arguing that its beau ideal is a monster of abstract entityions, formed out of the purportedly human element in each of whites four prime virtues (41). Bloom continues by exploring the changes in the virtues from one poem to the other, finally exposing them as founded upon the exploiting selfishness of natural man (143). The Divine Image receives delinquent critical recognition for the first time in 1964, when E. D. Hirsch asserts the centrality of the poem to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience by proposing as its theme the divinity of humanity and the humanity of divinity.Hirsch theorizes that Blakes choice of virtues reveals h is identification with God the Son (the revolutionary Testament God) over God the Father (the Old Testament God). In his 1967 discussion of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Sir Geoffrey Keynes concerns himself primarily with the plate of The Divine Image. Keynes first affirms the theme of the poem as the identification of man with God (Plate 18), and he then continues by arguing that the decoration on the plate a strange flame-like growth, half veggie and half fire (Plate 18) is a symbol of human life. Meanwhile, David J. Smith returns to a comparison between The Divine Image and A Divine Image in a 1967 article entitled, appropriately enough, Blakes The Divine Image. According to Smith, the less definite A in the title A Divine Image allows him to compare that poems remotely situated God with the immanent God of The Divine Image.Smith continues by placing the poetic speaker of The Divine Image in a state of innocence, thus explaining the simplistic unity of the virtues in the poem. John Holloway enters the critical discussion concerning The Divine Image in his 1968 text, Blake The Lyric Poetry. In his alternatively straight, new-critical reading of Blakes poems, Holloway compares the diction and meter of The Divine Image with that of hymns of the period. Holloway asserts that the poem contains no visionary fibre because it is too neatly constructed and because that neat construction invites a retort by the reader. Eben Basss 1970 article, Songs of Innocence and of Experience The Thrust of Design, contains a narrow discussion of the relationship between the reversed S curvature of the flame-plant in the plate of The Divine Image and Blakes dramatization of the two contrary states of humanity. Robert Gleckner returns to the critical communion in 1977 with his note concerning Blake and the Four Daughters of God.In this brief article, Gleckner argues that the allegory of the Four Daughters of God may be a source for Blakes four virtues in The Di vine Image. Gleckner continues by positing that Blakes replacement of two of the daughters accuracy and Justice with the virtues of Pity and Love might reveal his affirmation of the unity of divinity and humanity, for Truth and Justice may be viewed as Old Testament moral virtues that are bypassed by the crude Testament Christ. Zachary Leader approaches the plate of The Divine Image from a different angle when he asserts in 1981 that the plate reinforces the poems theme (God as both transcendent and immanent) by positioning a Christ figure at the plates bottom (Earth) and angelic figures at the plates top (Heaven). Leader argues that the abstract quality of the poem reflects Blakes dilemma in dealing with the qualities of an abstract God. Heather Glens thorough examination of The Divine Image in her 1983 work, Vision and Disenchantment Blakes Songs and Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads, posits Blakes poem as an exploration of the dynamics of prayer (150) by study it with Alexander Po pes The Universal Prayer.Glen demonstrates the similarities between the structure of The Divine Image and the structure of a scientific experiment. She then proves that the poem moves from the abstraction of the four virtues to their embodiment in the human form divine. Finally, Glen reveals the two-edged temperament of the virtues of Mercy and Pity by arguing that each contains a presumption of inequality within itself (an agate line somewhat similar to that made by Bloom in Blakes Apocalypse). Stanley Gardner briefly notes the plate of The Divine Image in his 1986 text, Blakes Innocence and Experience Retraced.Gardner asserts that the design of the plate deals with the ideal of reconciliation derived from the fulfillment of Christian compassion (54). David Lindsay also concerns himself with the abstract virtues of The Divine Image in his 1989 work, Reading Blakes Songs. Lindsay demonstrates the transforming place that The Human Abstract has upon the virtues of The Divine Image by asserting that the idolatry of the concepts of pity and mercy propagates the slimy on which its idols thrive (80).Finally (and perhaps fittingly), E. P. Thompson positions The Divine Image as the axle upon which the Songs of Innocence turn (146) in his 1993 text, Witness against the Beast William Blake and the Moral Law. Thompson continues by exposing the egalitarian humanism (153) that underlies The Divine Image. According to Thompson, the poem concerns not divine humanity, but human divinity. Thompson does assert (like Hirsch) that Blake emphasizes the humanity of God the Son over the divinity of God the Father, but he concludes by demonstrating that the poet does not elevate Christ above the rest of the moral design that shares in the same divine essence.