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Blake’s THE HUMAN ABSTRACT
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace,
Till the selfish loves increase;
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears;
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and Fly
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought through Nature to find this Tree,
But their search was all in vain;
There grows one in the Human Brain.
Martin Nurmi, in his essay on Blake‟s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell writes,
“„Negations‟…simply deny and seek to destroy each other,” (Blake‟s 557). This idea of
negations is the core of Blake‟s poem, “The Human Abstract.” The OED tells us that the
word “Abstract” means, “To withdraw, deduct, remove or take away from something.”
This definition lends itself beautifully to the idea of negation. When humans are
abstracted from the Divine, they are left with only the abstraction of the Divine emotions.
We can see by the capitalization scheme that this poem‟s form centers around words. The
primary words of this poem, echoing from it‟s mirror in Songs of Innocence are Pity,
Mercy, Peace and Love. Considering this poem as an excellent mirror for “The Divine
Image,” and if we classify “The Divine Image” as God‟s song, we can see that “The
Human Abstract” has become the Devil‟s Song (Introduction 165). As Blakean
researcher S. Foster Damon states, it is the Devil‟s influence that mars and distorts the
divine attributes into ones that can corrupt humans (269). Each word suffers a corruption
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in the poem, or acts as it‟s opposite, in order to grow the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil, the tree that marked the beginning of man‟s troubles on earth.
Starting with the corruption of pity, we see an injection of hypocrisy. True pity does not
wish to make others poor, but pity for the sake of pity, or for the outward look of pity
must require that others remain poor. The privileged can only experience the negated
form of pity if there is someone lower. Without a level below them, they can no longer
feel the abstracted pity they desire. While Blake does not assign “pity” a specific
negation, we see how pity is negated and therefore no longer can be qualified as pity.
Instead, it becomes its own negation.
The speaker of the poem claims cruelty to be the negation of mercy. Where there is no
mercy, there is cruelty, not justice as is biblically stated (Damon 269). Again, an air of
hypocrisy. Instead of truly wishing for mercy, the speaker leads the reader to believe that
in order for one party to experience these divine attributes, another must be suffering, and
even made to suffer. The eighth line of the poem, “And spreads his baits with care,”
suggests that he—Cruelty personified—sets traps to harm others, in order to have
someone to show false mercy towards. Without divine mercy, one must be its abstraction
and negation: cruel.
Peace, we see, is only obtained through coinciding fears and is therefore, not really an
amelioration of anything (line 5). Again, a negation. Abstracted from true peace, there is
only fear. A construct of peace can be created out of the acknowledgement of common
fears, but it does not bring relief. Here, like pity, peace is serving as its own negative.
Because the peace is not genuine, it is removed from the divine. Without the divine, the
construct of peace is of the devil.
Love when used selfishly (line 6), as all emotions in the poem begin to be, becomes
corrupt. Here Blake does not offer a straight negation. The negation of Love is simply the
absence of love. As Nurmi states, this false love will simply deny and destroy any
genuine or divine love.
In the third stanza, we begin to see that hypocritical humility—which really is, in the
spirit of looking for negatives, pride—is the root of all other sins. This tree, the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil, grows and feeds the caterpillar and houses the raven,
the symbol of the fear of death (Damon 341). While God has tried to wipe this tree from
the face of the earth, He cannot. It is rooted in the human brain (lines 22-24). It is
interesting that this tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, has a negative in
the Tree of Eternal Life. The first tree abstracted Adam and Eve from God, allowing
Satan‟s corrupting influence into the world.
Instead of being the opposite of God, the Devil is His negation. Nurmi states, opposites,
“when allowed to interact without external restraint, impart to life a motion and a tension
that make it creative,” (556). God and Satan cannot be opposites because they do not
work positively together, they to not create that tension. Where there is not God, there is
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the Devil and his destructive forces. If emotions are not divine, as they are in “The Divine
Image,” then they are abstracted and satanic, or at least open to his control.
—9939
Works Cited
Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of
New England, 1988. Print.
"Introduction." Poets: American and British. Ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. Vol. 1. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998. 155-177. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 5
Feb. 2011.
Nurmi, Martin. “On The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs.
Johnson, Mary Lynn, and Grant, John E., eds. New York, NY: W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 2008. p554-560. Print.
The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd Ed. 2001. Print.
Works Consulted
Jones, Lindsay, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. Vol. 14. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan
Reference USA, 2005. p9333-9340. Print.