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Blake - 'A Divine Image'?

Hi, can anyone help me with this poem? I'm meant to be presenting it to my class tomorrow, but I don't really know what to say! So far I've got:

It's the counterpart to 'The Divine Image' from Innocence.

It uses the same imagery of the face and the heart and so on, but instead of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love you've now got Cruelty, Jealousy, Terror and Secrecy, all things related to the world of experience.

Repetition of human - any reason why?

Furnace/forge imagery in the second stanza - is this related to 'The Tiger'?
Alliteration of 'f' sound.

Rhyme scheme: abcb, 2 quatrains.

That's all I've got really. Can anyone add to this? Because it seems a bit literal really. Thanks.

Reply 1

man123

8

reptition of human becasue it is up to people to decide whats good or evil not the church "there grows one in the human brain".

This poem is an analogy questioning religion. Tree of mystery illustrates the growth of religion. The caterpiller and fly(who are the church and vicars) feed of this tree. The churh feed of the mystery of god, there are corrupt

6 quatrains of ryhming couplets.

4 stanza sibliance of s sounds, remeinds me of serpant of adam and eve story and the "fruit of deciet" represents the rebellion towards the corruption of the church.

Can bring in Emmanual Swedenborg for refernce.

Hope that helps so far

Reply 2

little one

11

the title of this one is "a" divine image, which is indefinate and suggests it is only in one person rather then definate and in more then one person as suggested by "the" in its counterpart

the structure of the poem shows symmetry, emphasising the visual destruction (as shown by the attachment) - link to industrialisation

this poem suggests that man which is created in gods image is cruel jealous etc

this poem suggests that fear is the root of all evil..possibly fear from religion etc?

divine image.JPG24.1KB

Reply 3

man123

8

i think she is talking about the human abstract?

Reply 4

crankycaz

OP

2

man123

reptition of human becasue it is up to people to decide whats good or evil not the church "there grows one in the human brain".

This poem is an analogy questioning religion. Tree of mystery illustrates the growth of religion. The caterpiller and fly(who are the church and vicars) feed of this tree. The churh feed of the mystery of god, there are corrupt

6 quatrains of ryhming couplets.

4 stanza sibliance of s sounds, remeinds me of serpant of adam and eve story and the "fruit of deciet" represents the rebellion towards the corruption of the church.

Can bring in Emmanual Swedenborg for refernce.

Hope that helps so far

Uh, that's very good, but I don't think you're referring to the right poem! There's no mention of trees in the poem...I'm asking about 'A Divine Image', as the title says...

Reply 5

little one

11

man123

i think she is talking about the human abstract?

no no its "a divine image"

Reply 6

spider from mars

13

the legend that is William Blake

A Divine Image

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge

.

I think the most interesting thing about this poem is the relationship between the title and the poem itself. Why is it called "divine" when it goes on to talk about humanity?

Reply 7

crankycaz

OP

2

Irony perhaps? I don't know really. I just assumed it was linked to Blake's view that humans all have a bit of the divine in themselves, which works with the Innocence poem, but not as much with this one.

Reply 8

minesweeper

The structure is interesting. Stanza two reverses the order of the items in stanza one. I think this is a kind of reversed parallelism called 'chiasmus'.

Blake - 'A Divine Image'?

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