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

In his 1932 article, An Interpretation of Blakes A manufacturing business video, Stephen Larrabee views the blameless verse form as a direct contrast to the humanitarian noble-mindedness (307) of The augur pic, with the author making direct line-by-line paritys of the two. Not until 1959, however, does a amateur 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(prenominal) of those virtues, while asserting that pity, pardon, and rest are each a part of, but distinct from, the quaternate and greatest virtue Love. Gleckner finally affirms the human form prognosticate as a composite of all of the quartet virtues. Gleckner returns in 1961 with a comparison between The oerlord visit and The Human Abstract. While primarily have-to doe with with The Human Abstract, Gleckner does position the unity of humanity and god in the four virtues of The ecclesiastic motion pictu re against the fall into fragmentation of the later poem.Gleckner also dismisses A miraculous Image, the poem sometimes compared with The Divine Image, as a clip with no subtlety of theme. Another comparison between The Divine Image and The Human Abstract occurs in Harold hot flashs 1963 text, Blakes divine revelation A Study in Poetic Argument. Here, Bloom asserts the deliberate rawness of The Divine Image by arguing that its God is a nut of generalisations, formed out of the supposedly human element in each of Innocences 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 due unfavourable recognition for the branch time in 1964, when E. D. Hirsch asserts the centrality of the poem to the discussiongs of Innocence and of put through by proposing as its theme the divinity of humanity and the humanity of div inity.Hirsch theorizes that Blakes choice of virtues reveals his identification with God the Son (the New volition 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 shell 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 vegetable and half fire (Plate 18) is a attribute of human life. Meanwhile, David J. smith returns to a comparison between The Divine Image and A Divine Image in a 1967 article entitled, suitably 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 innocen ce, 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 quality because it is too neatly constructed and because that neat social structure 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 transposed S curve 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 conversation in 1977 with his note of hand concerning Blake and the Four Daughters of God.In this brief article, Gleckner argues that the allegory of the F our Daughters of God may be a source for Blakes four virtues in The Divine Image. Gleckner continues by positing that Blakes replacement of two of the daughters honor 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 example virtues that are bypassed by the New 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 dealings 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 exp loration of the dynamics of prayer (150) by compare it with Alexander Popes 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 nature of the virtues of Mercy and Pity by arguing that each contains a presumption of unlikeness within itself (an argument 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 balancing 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 power 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 distraint 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 upgrade Christ above the rest of the moral creation that shares in the comparable divine essence.