The Human Abstract (poem)

The Gods of the earth and sea, Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain[3] The poem was engraved on a single plate as a part of the Songs of Experience (1794) and reprinted in Gilchrist's Life of Blake in the second volume 1863/1880 from the draft in the Notebook of William Blake (p. 107 reversed, see the example on the right), where the first title of the poem The Earth was erased and The human Image substituted.

In the commentary to his publication of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, D. G. Rossetti described this poem as one of "very perfect and noble examples of Blake's metaphysical poetry".

The picture portrays the supreme God of Blake's mythology and the creator of the material world, whom Blake named "Urizen" (probably from your reason), struggling with his own nets of religion, under the Tree of Mystery, which symbolically "represents the resulting growth of religion and the priesthood (the Catterpillar and the Fly), feeding on its leaves".

In "The Divine Image" of Innocence Blake establishes four great virtues: mercy, pity, peace, and love, where the last one is the greatest and embraces the other three.

In such a world virtue cannot exist except as a rationally conceived opposite to vice.”[8] Blake made two more attempts to create a counterpart poem to The Divine Image of Innocence.

One of them, A Divine Image, was clearly intended for Songs of Experience, and was even etched, but not included into the main corpus of the collection:[note 1][9]

"The poem's discursiveness, its rather mechanical, almost mathematical simplicity make it unlike other songs of experience; the obviousness of the contrast suggests a hasty, impulsive composition..."[11] The four virtues of The Divine Image (mercy, pity, peace, and love) that incorporated the human heart, face, form, and dress were abstracted here from the corpus of the divine, become selfish and hypocritically disguise their true natures, and perverted into cruelty, jealousy, terror, and secrecy.

[Mercy] Pity could be no more [If there was nobody poor] If we did not make somebody poor And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we In the second stanza the word "baits" is a replacement of the deleted word "nets": And mutual fear brings Peace Till the selfish Loves increase Then Cruelty knits a snare And spreads his [nets] baits with care Third, fourth and fifth stanzas arranged exactly as in the last etched version, however with no punctuation marks: He sits down with holy fears And waters the ground with tears Then humility takes its root Underneath his foot

And it bears the fruit of deceit Ruddy & sweet to eat And the raven his nest has made In its thickest shade The last quatrain of the poem is the replacement of the following passage: The Gods of the Earth & Sea Sought thro nature to find this tree But their search was all in vain [Till they sought in the human brain] There grows one in the human brain

There souls of men a bought & sold And [cradled] milk fed infancy [is sold] for gold And youth[s] to slaughter houses led And [maidens] beauty for a bit of bread As was observed by the scholars, the ideas of the poem correspond with some other works of Blake which show deeper insight.

where the growth of it is defined; rooted in the rock of separation, watered with the tears of a jealous God, shot up from sparks and fallen germs of material seed; being after all a growth of mere error, and vegetable (not spiritual) life; the topmost stem of it made into a cross whereon to nail the dead redeemer and friend of men.'".

A deadly Tree, he nam'd it Moral Virtue, and the Law Of God who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight.