August 23, 2021

The Divine Image
By: William Blake (1789)

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, 5 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, 10 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. 15 And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew. Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too.

Bibliography

• Ackroyd, Peter (1995). Blake: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books.
• Battenhouse, Henry M. (1958). English Romantic Writers. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc.
• Bloom, Harold (2003). William Blake. Bloom’s Major Poets. New York: Chelsea House.
• Frye, Northrup (1947). Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Gardner, Stanley (1969). Blake. Literary Critiques. New York: Arco.
• Green, Martin Burgess (1972). Cities of Light and Sons of Morning. Boston: Little, Brown.
• Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Major Authors. 2 (Tenth ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.
• Makdisi, Saree (2003). "The Political Aesthetic of Blake's Images". In Eaves, Morris. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. pp. 110–132.
• — (2015). Reading William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Paulin, Tom (March 3, 2007). "The Invisible Worm". Guardian. Retrieved 2021-09-04.
• Thompson, E. P. (1993). Witness Against the Beast. New York: The New Press.
• Tomlinson, Alan (1987). Song of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. MacMillan Master Guides. London: MacMillan Education.
• Wolfson, Susan J. (2003). "Blake's Language in Poetic Form". In Eaves, Morris. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. pp. 63–83.

Links and Web Resources

• Blake at the Internet Archive.
• Blake’s Notebook at the British Museum.
• William Blake Study Questions