Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, July 18th, 2024.

Today's poem comes to us from the 19th century romantic painter, engraver, and poet, William Blake, and is called The Divine Image.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more

time. The divine image. To 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,

praise 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, their God is dwelling too.

Blake was a pious man throughout the entirety of his life, and yet he wrestled with many facets of Orthodox Christian theology.

And this poem, I think, is a great example of that wrestling.

There was a period early on in his poetic career in which Jesus made many appearances in his poems.

And then following the publication of his well-known collection,

Songs of Innocence, Jesus seemed to vanish from his verse altogether.

Blake would later explain that this followed a shift in his own personal theology

in which he came to conclude that Jesus was a great prophet and a moral exemplar, but nothing more, that he was merely the best kind of man, but purely man, nonetheless.

He claimed that his thinking on this point shifted again when he was fully struck by

man's need for the aid of some greater power beyond and outside of himself. So we have this poem,

the divine image, which seems to find Blake maybe somewhere in between those positions.

...