The Divine Image -- William Blake

(Poem #771) The Divine Image Cruelty has a Human Heart, And Jealousy a Human Face; Terror the Human Form Divine, And Secrecy the Human Dress. The Human Dress is forged Iron, The Human Form a fiery Forge, The Human Face a Furnace seal'd, The Human Heart is hungry Gorge. -- William Blake

Blake is in full Apocalypse Mode here, all fire and fury and righteous
indignation. In a lesser poet it would be pretentious; in Blake, it's
amazingly, indisputably _right_.

thomas.

[Et cetera]

There are poets who are inextricably linked with particular forms and
metres; for example, Longfellow [1], Yeats [2] and yes, William Blake [3].

[1] See the often celebrated and even more often parodied "Song of
Hiawatha":
 By the shore of Gitchie Gumee,
 By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
 At the doorway of his wigwam,
 In the pleasant Summer morning,
 Hiawatha stood and waited.
        -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Hiawatha's Departure", Poem #362
See Poem #559, "The Modern Hiawatha", by George A. Strong, for a fairly nice
example of a Hiawatha parody.

[2] See, especially, the third and final section of Auden's elegy "In Memory
of W. B. Yeats" (Poem #50) for an excellent tribute in the form that the
Master made his own.

[3] Many of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience" are written in the same
metre as today's poem, as is "Auguries of Innocence". See
[broken link] http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/blake02.html for the complete set
of the former, and Poem #368 on the Minstrels website for the latter.

[Minstrels Links]

Other poems by William Blake:
Poem #26, "Jerusalem"
Poem #66, "The Tyger"
Poem #97, "The Fly"
Poem #368, "Auguries of Innocence"
Poem #546, "The Sick Rose"

[Administrivia]

The email I sent a few hours ago titled "The Month in Comments: March 2001"
should have been titled "The Month in Comments: April 2001". An entirely
pardonable lapse, caused solely by this reviewer's occasional ignorance of
day, month, and, indeed, year.

As you may have noticed, there has been a preponderance of guest poem
submissions recently (and a corresponding paucity of commentary from Martin
and myself). This is because we've both been travelling and/or busy; we hope
to return you to your scheduled service soon.