1To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
2All pray in their distress:
3And to these virtues of delight
4Return their thankfulness.
5For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
6Is God, our father dear:
7And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
8Is Man, his child and care.
9For Mercy has a human heart,
10Pity, a human face:
11And Love, the human form divine,
12And Peace, the human dress.
13Then every man of every clime,
14That prays in his distress,
15Prays to the human form divine,
16Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
17And all must love the human form,
18In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
19Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell,
20There God is dwelling too.
"The Divine Image" is one of the most famous of William Blake's poems in his Songs of Innocence collection, first published in 1789. In this poem, a speaker proclaims that God's "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love" appear on earth in "the human form." Because God's gentleness and kindness express themselves through humankind, every person has a bit of God in them. And this, the speaker argues, should create a feeling of connection and unity between all people.
In difficult times, everyone prays for mercy, pity, peace, and love. And when people are feeling grateful, it's these same wonderful qualities they thank.
Because God, our caring father, is none other than the forces of mercy, pity, peace, and love themselves. And Humanity, God's beloved child, is also an embodiment of these qualities.
That's because mercy appears in the human heart, and pity has a human face. Love takes the shape of the human body, and peace wears human clothing.
Therefore, every single suffering person in the whole world who prays is actually praying to the holy human body, which is the embodiment of love, mercy, pity, and peace.
So everybody must love and care for every person, whatever religion they practice. Since mercy, love, and pity (which are God) take human form, that means that God lives inside every person.
The poem's speaker says that humanity was made in God’s own image, but that doesn’t mean that the human shape physically resembles God. Rather, it means that people embody God’s powerful goodness: his “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” are expressed on earth through people. And this connection between humanity and God, the speaker insists, also connects human beings to each other: every person expresses the goodness of God, and every living person is thus holy. All people, whatever their background, are thus united by their shared divinity.
To this speaker, “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” aren’t just attributes of God—they are God, “our father dear” himself. And, at the exact same time, they’re “Man, [God’s] child”—that is, all of these qualities are embodied by human beings. Mercy, for instance, “has a human heart”: it’s through real, live human hearts that the divine quality of mercy appears on earth. In other words, humanity expresses God.
Since God’s virtues appear on earth in human form, it follows that everyone carries God with them, just by virtue of being a person. God’s “divine image” lives on earth, the speaker argues, through “the human form divine.” When people “pray in their distress” to God, they’re thus also praying to the goodness and kindness of humanity (because, again that goodness and kindness is God).
If God lives in the “human form,” the speaker proclaims, then people don’t just need to remember that they can seek and express God’s goodness in themselves. They need to remember that God’s goodness lives in every person. That truth cuts across false distinctions between religions and cultures: addressing a predominantly Christian audience, this speaker reminds readers that God lives in “heathen, Turk, or Jew,” not just in Christians. All people must love every single “human form” for this very reason. Through “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,” then, God lives in every “human form”—and unites all people.
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
"The Divine Image" seems deceptively simple at its start. The first lines here feel like a Christian hymn, and, at first glance, not an especially unusual one at that: they declare that everyone in "distress" prays to qualities often associated with God—"Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love"—and then that they thank those same qualities for their good fortune.
The shape of these lines also feels pretty traditional. Using common meter—alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (four da-DUMs in a row) and iambic trimeter (three da-DUMs)—and a simple, singsongy ABCB rhyme scheme, this first stanza could come straight from a nursery rhyme or a ballad. In other words, the speaker of this poem is working right with readers' expectations, opening with familiar, comforting rhythms, shapes, and ideas.
But this is a poem by William Blake—and that means it's going to turn out to be anything but traditional. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, the 1789 collection this poem comes from, expresses his fiery, prophetic, and unorthodox vision of Christianity. This poem will use a deceptively gentle shape to deliver a revolutionary message.
God, to this poem's speaker, isn't just a merciful, pitying, peaceful, loving dad-in-the-clouds. (Blake rejected this idea of a separate, distant God outright, dismissively calling such a figure "Nobodaddy.") God is right here on earth, all the time, actually embodied by every person alive.
Presenting this idea in a form as simple as a nursery rhyme, the speaker is actually offering a challenge: this radical belief, the speaker seems to say, is in fact so pure, instinctive, and fundamental that I can sing it like a child's song.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God, our father dear:
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is Man, his child and care.
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Get LitCharts A+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, & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
"The Divine Image" subtly alludes to biblical stories in both its title and its general ideas.
In the first chapter of the biblical Book of Genesis, God is said to create humans "in [his] image, according to [his] likeness." In other words, God builds humans so that they resemble him. To this poem's speaker, that doesn't mean that God is a human-shaped being or humans look the way they do because that's how God looks. Rather, the speaker feels that the "Divine Image" of God is a set of qualities that get expressed through the human body: "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love." In fact, these qualities are "God, our father dear." Anywhere that these virtues appear, then, God himself is present.
The poem's central allusion to the biblical creation myth thus provides a leaping-off point for a big (and, at the time Blake was writing, iconoclastic) idea: every single human being carries God inside them, because every single human being can express "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love" (and, again, in the speaker's mind, those qualities are God). The "human form" itself is thus "divine" because it's the way that God exists on earth.
Through this idea, the poem also alludes to the Incarnation: the Christian idea that Jesus was completely a human being and completely God at exactly the same time. In this poem, every "human form" is an incarnation of God in just the same way, since everyone can express and contain God.
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Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
Loving forgiveness.
"The Divine Image" is one of William Blake's poem's in Songs of Innocence, a collection he eventually merged with a companion volume, Songs of Experience, to form (you guessed it) Songs of Innocence and Experience. The poems in this collection approach grand mysteries of human life with deceptive simplicity, using straightforward forms to explore complex ideas.
This poem, for instance, uses only five short quatrains (four-line stanzas), a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, and down-to-earth common meter. The effect is rather like a nursery rhyme—except, this is a nursery rhyme that proclaims the nature of God himself! Many of the Songs of Innocence play similar tricks, presenting grand (and sometimes unsettling) ideas in a voice of childlike simplicity.
Part of Blake's point in using such a simple form is to suggest that truths like the ones this poem expresses are all part of a natural human wisdom—an instinctive religiosity that people lose as they grow up, and must work to regain.
Many of the poems in Songs of Innocence also have a counterpart in Songs of Experience—a companion poem that approaches the same ideas from a sometimes grim or world-weary adult perspective. This poem's counterpart is called "A Divine Image," and it uses the same basic form as this poem to make the point that humanity embodies not just "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love," but all kinds of evils, too.
"The Divine Image" uses common meter: a back-and-forth pattern of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. That means that the meter alternates between lines with four iambs—metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm—and lines with three iambs.
Here's how that sounds in lines 1-2:
To Mer- | cy, Pi-| ty, Peace, | and Love,
All pray | in their | distress:
This singsongy meter feels simple and gentle, and might remind readers of nursery rhymes. That makes sense considering this poem's context: one of Blake's Songs of Innocence, this poem speaks to a joyful, childlike understanding of the world. But common meter is also traditionally used in hymns—and there's certainly a lot of powerful religious sentiment here, too.
Like a lot of poems written in common meter, "The Divine Image" uses this rhyme scheme:
ABCB
This back-and-forth pattern appears in lots of down-to-earth, folksy flavors of poetry, from nursery rhymes to ballads. Here, these rhymes might even feel deceptively simple: this poem is using straightforward sounds and language to deliver a complex and awe-inspiring message of human divinity.
This poem also plays with this simple scheme in some interesting ways. Take a look at the rhymes in the fourth stanza, for instance:
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
While this stanza still essentially follows the ABCB pattern, it's also doing something more complicated. The B rhymes "Distress" and "Peace," which would usually be perfect rhymes in this pattern, are instead slant rhymes, sharing a sibilant /s/ consonant sound, but using slightly different vowel sounds. And at a second glance, the A and C, "clime" and "divine," are slant rhymes, too: they share an assonant long /i/ sound. Linking similar-but-different sounds across this stanza, the speaker mirror the connections between "every man of every clime" that these lines describe: people, too, are similar across their differences!
"The Divine Image" doesn't give readers much direct information about its speaker, but nevertheless makes it clear that this speaker is a person of deep (and unorthodox) faith.
To this speaker, everyone in the world is equally part of the "Divine Image." All humans express godly virtues merely by being human. That belief cuts across boundaries of culture and religion: a connection to God doesn't come through any one belief system, but through plain old humanity.
In proclaiming this fervent belief, the speaker of this poem sounds a lot like William Blake himself. Blake believed in (and indeed, invented) a famously wild, anti-denominational, and prophetic version of Christianity, in which every person is a version of Christ, embodying God.
But the reader should remember that this poem isn't Blake's final word on the matter of human divinity: in a corresponding poem in Blake's Songs of Experience, "A Divine Image," humanity also embodies a multitude of evils! This poem's speaker thus expresses just one facet of Blake's prismatic imagination.
There's no distinct setting in "The Divine Image": this is a philosophical statement of belief, not a story grounded in a place. In a sense, then, this poem is set anywhere that the "divine image" appears. In other words, the "action" of this poem takes place all over the world: wherever there's a person to embody godly virtues, the speaker suggests, this poem is relevant.
However, there's certainly a hint here that this speaker has a particular place and time in mind. The exhortation to extend love to "heathen, Turk, or Jew" suggests that the speaker's audience doesn't fit into any of those categories—and that they might, in fact, be the predominantly Christian people of 18th- and 19th-century London, the time and place where Blake wrote this poem.
William Blake (1757-1827) is often considered one of the earliest English Romantic poets—but he's unlike any other. In fact, Blake is a unique figure in literature, full stop. His wild, prophetic poems (which he illustrated, hand-engraved, printed, and distributed himself) express a whole cosmology of his own.
During his lifetime, he was seen as an eccentric: even the noted Romantic visionary Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked that "I am in the very mire of common-place common-sense compared with Mr. Blake." But since his death, Blake has become one of the best-known, best-loved, and most influential of poets. His works have left deep marks on writers from Olga Tokarczuk to Philip Pullman (to name only two recent examples).
"The Divine Image" first appeared in Songs of Innocence and Experience, perhaps Blake's most famous work. The two halves of this book treat related ideas from different angles. The Songs of Innocence read the world from a visionary, childlike perspective of unity, joy, and delight (tempered with intense indignation about 19th-century cruelty to children and people of color). The Songs of Experience consider what happens when people forget their sacred connection to God, each other, and their own souls—and the ways in which organized religion, in Blake's view, downright demands such amnesia.
Many poems in Songs of Innocence have a counterpart in Songs of Experience, and "The Divine Image" is one of them. In its partner poem, "A Divine Image," the speaker points out how humanity expresses, not just "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love," but "Cruelty," "Jealousy," "Terror," and "Secrecy."
Blake conceived most of his poems not just as text, but as illuminated manuscripts in which illustrations deepen (and sometimes complicate or contradict) the meanings of the words. He produced his books using an innovative technique he called the "infernal method." Where most engravers would carve into the copper plates they printed with, Blake painted his poems and pictures directly onto his plates with a resilient ink, then submerged them in a bath of acid so that the material around the images was burnt away. This process fit right in with his philosophy: he believed his role as an artist was to burn away the dross of falsehood to reveal "the infinite that was hid."
William Blake spent much of his life writing poetry that railed against the cruelties of English society. And he had plenty to rail against.
The England of Blake's time was just getting caught up in the Industrial Revolution, a period during which the economy shifted from farming to manufacturing. The countryside began to empty out, and the cities began to swell. And English class divisions, always intense, began to seem even more pronounced as impoverished workers lived cheek-by-jowl with the fashionable and wealthy in newly crowded towns.
Workers during the early Industrial Revolution got a pretty raw deal. Even young children were forced to work in factories, dig in mines, and sweep chimneys (an absurdly dangerous job, contrary to the cheery Mary Poppins image many are familiar with: chimney-sweeps regularly suffocated to death, wedged in narrow flues). Adults didn't have it much easier. With few regulations to keep factory owners in check, bosses could impose impossible working hours, or withhold pay for any number of trifling offenses.
Blake's passionate, prophetic stance on humankind's innate divinity also made him a fiery critic of the societal inhumanity he saw all around him in the streets of his native London. And Blake was only one in a long series of writers who saw 19th-century working conditions—and the poverty that always threatened workers—as an affront to humanity. Charles Dickens would later make similar protests in novels like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.
Blake's Beliefs — Read noted scholar Kathleen Raine on Blake's ideas about how humanity relates to the divine.
Blake's Influence — Read novelist Philip Pullman's appreciation of Blake.
Songs of Innocence and Experience — Learn more about the Songs of Innocence and Experience, the famous collection this poem comes from—and see this poem in its original form as a hand-engraved, beautifully illustrated print.
The Poem as a Song — Listen to this poem set to music by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The Blake Archive — Visit the Blake Archive to learn more about Blake's life and work, and to see images of his visionary art.
The Poem Aloud — Listen to the poem read aloud (complete with a creepy animation of Blake's face).