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

'In his 1932 article, â€Å"An Interpretation of Blake’s â€Å"‘A miraculous estimate,” Stephen Larrabee views the entire meter as a direct contrast to the â€Å" add-on idealism” (307) of â€Å"The manufacturing business take in,” with the author fashioning direct line-by-line coincidences of the two. Not until 1959, however, does a critic actu totallyy examine Blake’s â€Å" fair plays of delight.” In his The Piper & the Bard: A subject of William Blake, Robert Gleckner traces the psychological roots of distri howeverively of those virtues, while asserting that Mercy, kindness, and Peace argon each a part of, but distinct from, the quaternth and greatest virtue †Love. Gleckner finally affirms the â€Å" hu part relieve oneself betoken” as a composite of all of the four virtues. Gleckner re turn backs in 1961 with a parity in the midst of â€Å"The comprehend Image” and â€Å"The benevolent Abs tract.” While primarily concerned with â€Å"The valet Abstract,” Gleckner does position the unity of human being and god in the four virtues of â€Å"The augur Image” against the fall into fragmentation of the later poesy.\r\nGleckner similarly dismisses â€Å"A betoken Image,” the poetry sometimes compared with â€Å"The predict Image,” as a reckon with no subtlety of theme. Another comparison between â€Å"The foretell Image” and â€Å"The man Abstract” occurs in Harold authorize’s 1963 text, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Here, extremum asserts the flip incompleteness of â€Å"The Divine Image” by arguing that its graven image is a â€Å" behemoth of abstractions, formed out of the supposedly human element in each of white’s four prime virtues” (41). Bloom continues by exploring the changes in the virtues from one poesy to the other, finally exposing them as à ¢â‚¬Å"founded upon the exploiting selfishness of natural man” (143). â€Å"The Divine Image” receives due minute recognition for the first-year time in 1964, when E. D. Hirsch asserts the centrality of the poem to the Songs of pureness and of Experience by proposing as its theme the divinity of beneficence and the humanity of divinity.\r\nHirsch theorizes that Blake’s choice of virtues reveals his designation with God the Son (the New testament God) over God the Father (the doddering Testament God). In his 1967 discussion of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Sir Geoffrey Keynes concerns himself primarily with the abode of â€Å"The Divine Image.” Keynes first affirms the theme of the poem as â€Å"the recognition of man with God” (Plate 18), and he consequently continues by arguing that the decoration on the central office †â€Å"a strange flame-like growth, half(a) vegetable and half fire” (Plate 18) †is a symbo l of human life. Meanwhile, David J. metalworker returns to a comparison between â€Å"The Divine Image” and â€Å"A Divine Image” in a 1967 article entitled, appropriately enough, â€Å"Blake’s ‘The Divine Image.” According to Smith, the less certain(prenominal) â€Å"A” in the title â€Å"A Divine Image” allows him to compare that poem’s remotely situated God with the immanent God of â€Å"The Divine Image.”\r\nSmith continues by placing the poetic speaker of â€Å"The Divine Image” in a estate of innocence, thus explaining the â€Å"simplistic” unity of the virtues in the poem. John Holloway enters the unfavourable discussion concerning â€Å"The Divine Image” in his 1968 text, Blake: The Lyric Poetry. In his rather straight, new-critical reading of Blake’s poems, Holloway compares the language and meter of â€Å"The Divine Image” with that of hymns of the period. Holloway asserts that the poem contains no visionary quality because it is as well as neatly constructed †and because that neat construction invites a retort by the reader. Eben Bass’s 1970 article, â€Å"Songs of Innocence and of Experience: The Thrust of Design,” contains a narrow discussion of the relationship between the reversed â€Å"S” curve of the flame-plant in the scurf of â€Å"The Divine Image” and Blake’s dramatization of the â€Å"two contrary states” of humanity. Robert Gleckner returns to the critical conversation in 1977 with his note concerning â€Å"Blake and the quaternary Daughters of God.”\r\nIn this brief article, Gleckner argues that the allegory of the iv Daughters of God may be a source for Blake’s four virtues in â€Å"The Divine Image.” Gleckner continues by positing that Blake’s reversal of two of the â€Å"daughters” †Truth and legal expert †with the virtues of Pity and L ove might reveal his avowal of the unity of divinity and humanity, for Truth and Justice may be viewed as sure-enough(a) Testament moral virtues that are bypassed by the New Testament Christ. Zachary Leader approaches the plate of â€Å"The Divine Image” from a several(predicate) angle when he asserts in 1981 that the plate reinforces the poem’s theme (God as both transcendent and immanent) by positioning a Christ figure at the plate’s bottom (Earth) and sweet figures at the plate’s top (Heaven). Leader argues that the abstract quality of the poem reflects Blake’s dilemma in traffic with the qualities of an abstract God. Heather Glen’s constitutional examination of â€Å"The Divine Image” in her 1983 work, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, posits Blake’s poem as an â€Å"exploration of the dynamics of prayer” (150) by comparing it with Alexander Pope’s â€Å"The Universal Prayer.”\r\nGlen demonstrates the similarities between the structure of â€Å"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 condition of inequality within itself (an argument sensibly similar to that made by Bloom in Blake’s Apocalypse). Stanley Gardner briefly notes the plate of â€Å"The Divine Image” in his 1986 text, Blake’s Innocence and Experience Retraced.\r\nGardner asserts that the design of the plate deals with the â€Å"ideal of reconciliation derived from the fulfillment of Christian compassion” (54). David Lindsay also concerns himself with the abstract virtues of â€Å"The Divine Image” in his 1989 work, Reading Blake’s Songs. Lindsay demonstrates t he transforming power that â€Å"The Human Abstract” has upon the virtues of â€Å"The Divine Image” by asserting that the devotion of the concepts of pity and mercy â€Å"propagates the suffering on which its idols thrive” (80).\r\nFinally (and perhaps fittingly), E. P. Thompson positions â€Å"The Divine Image” as the â€Å"axle upon which the Songs of Innocence turn” (146) in his 1993 text, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the good Law. Thompson continues by exposing the â€Å"egalitarian humanism” (153) that underlies â€Å"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 elevate Christ above the rest of the moral creation that shares in the same divine essence.\r\n'