The Divine Image Defined

Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love the four tradition Christian virtues are used as the human form for William Blake’s poem, Divine Image, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and later in the joint collection of Songs of Innocence and of Experience five years later. William Blake is trying to convey in this work that when we pray, we pray mostly for mercy, pity, peace, and love. These things we pray for make up God and his virtues that we praise him for his caring and comforting us through prayer.

 In the poem it states that mercy is the human heart, pity is a human face, love is the human form divine, and peace is the human dress relating to humans, yet it also states, “For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,/ Is God our Father dear;/ And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,/ Is man, his child and care.” These lines reflect that mercy, pity, peace, and love are not only in God, but that those virtues are us and we are the “divine image”.

The stanza, “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” is explaining that we share the same virtues as God that anyone who is praying, is praying to the divine image and we must all love it that means we are praying to ourselves and we must also learn to love ourselves not only God. The lines, “Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,/ There God is dwelling too” means since we are all of those virtues, God is living inside of us as the peacemaker because it is the only one missing from those four.