Notes
1] This poem is closely related to the poem in Songs of Experience called "The Human Abstract," which is the counterpart in experience to "The Divine Image" in Songs of Innocence (see above). A draft of "The Human Abstract," with the title "The Human Image," is also in the Rossetti MS. In Blake's thought "image" and "abstract" are the units of the creative and the anti-creative attitudes respectively.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: William Blake, Poems, ed. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1863).
First publication date:
1863
RPO poem editor: Northrop Frye
RP edition: 3RP 2.290.
Recent editing: 4:2002/3/14
Composition date:
1793
Composition date note: ca. 1793
Rhyme: aabb