Nightlion wrote:An intriguing sort of composition I dare say.
Is there more to it?
I am only half as shocked as I think I could be.
I don't know how familiar you are with Blake's work, so forgive me if this is too simplistic an introduction/explanation.
Blake was both a writer and a visual artist. He was an engraver by trade, but he also made his own works in pencil, ink, watercolour and engraving/copying processes he developed. He was a unique artist and thinker. His religious views were very eccentric: basically he had a great love for the Bible, but felt it had been misunderstood/corrupted by existing religious institutions. Part of his disagreement lay in the taboo against things physical: Blake understood sensual pleasure as an essential part of God's creation and man's senses, all of them, as worthy of cultivation.
He was also iconoclastic artistically, since he did not see word and image as existing in a hierarchy with image subordinate to text: on other words, as mere illustration. In his own work he combined text and image, and while the anthologies we read today print Blake's poems as just words on a page, he originally printed them as complex images where text and picture intertwined, with neither subordinate to the other.
One of his first works was a collection called
The Songs of Innocence. This book is comprised of very metrically simple poems expressing the joys of childhood: a time of innocence, a kind of Edenic, pre-Fall world, were the spirit can experience and grow untrammeled by what Blake would later call "the mind-forged manacles" of religion and social convention.
Five years later he returned to the work and added
The Songs of Experience. These are a set of poems, most of which take an earlier poem from
Songs of Innocence and rework it to express the post-Fall world of the adult where the human spirit is suppressed and forced to conform to social rule and corrupt religious doctrine. (Blake was an English Dissenter, by the way.)
The poem I sent you, "A Divine Image," is from the later work, and exemplifies the fallen state. It's counterpart from
The Songs of Innocence is called "The Divine Image:"
Here is "The Divine Image"
The Divine ImageTo 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,
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,
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.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."