The Human Abstract

By William Blake

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.

1. Comment of the Poem.

This poem belongs to the book called “The Songs of Innocence and Experience” published in 1794, as we know by William Blake. We find “The Human Abstract” poem at the second part of the book, The Songs of Experience. Here, there is a contrast because the main topic of Blake’s poem depends on his experience, he writes about the things, experiences, feelings and thoughts that he has lived by his own. In order to this, we still can see through his poems the topics like childhood, religion, love, a critic of society and beliefs, etc. But the vision of these poems change referring to the innocence and imagination that we maybe find into the poems which make the Songs of Innocence (1789).

As we have said before, the religion is one of the most important and characteristic referring to the topics that Blake used to write about. Later, we will explain why and other things related to this. Now, we are going to focus in the poem “The Human Abstract” and we will try to explain and analyse, step by step, all the things related to poetry that we could see and find through the poem.

At first, in a short and not very deep read we discover what Blake is talking about. He is talking about the abstract things that take part of human being. These abstract things also involve other abstract figures as God, religion beliefs and some passages of the Bible. In this way, we see in this superficial reading what is very important to the author and what the author wants to transmit to the reader. This importance not only is the religion author’s mind and mythical beliefs, if not Blake tries to transmit the conception of Human as individual and the bad and good things with which everybody cohabit. As we know, everybody have a bad and also a good part of her, so this is what Blake is criticising with this poem. The nature of man is to be bad and with the rising of this bad behaviour appears her contrary, which is the good behaviour. Here, Blake is suggesting that one part cannot exist without the other, for this reason we can make a relation between Blake calls “contraries”. “He is based on a firm distinction between what is imaginative and what is natural in us, with the natural rejected, cast out beyond the balance of these “contraries” (Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, Romantic Poetry and Prose, 11) . According to this, in the poem we can see this relation or balance: Pity / Poverty, Mercy / Pain, Peace / Fear and finally, Cruelty / Humility.

For this reason we can affirm that “The Human Abstract” reflects on the pity and mercy of the human form. The poem state that humans can only have these characteristics through the poverty and unhappy of others as a result of their actions. As we have said above, this poem also states the other characteristics mankind (Cruelty, Mystery, and Deceit). Mankind cannot resist the urge to lie and cheat to get where they what in life, no matter how many people are harmed mentally or physically in the process. The only reason of human Humility as we can appreciate by the poem is because of their “Holy Fears”(apparently), the fear of being damned or punished for eternity because of their actions.

“He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears,
Then humility takes its root
Underneath his foot”
(Stanza 3, “The Human Abstract”)

Talking about the stanza 4, when the author says: “Of Mystery over his head”, in a first view we can be very confused because the meaning of this verse can be a little obscure, but later, it seems to be referring to the tree, which “bears the fruit of Deceit”. That would mean the caterpillars and flies that feed on the “dismal shade of Mystery” would be symbols of disease, a sickness in the human mind, which would be corruption. Caterpillars causes great amount of damage to trees like a “plague”, and flies can transfer sickness from one person to another infecting them implying that mankind corrupts or destroys everything that they touch.

“Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and Fly
Feed on the Mystery”.

(Stanza 4, “The Human Abstract”)

Moreover, in the following quatrain, Blake uses the adjectives “Ruddy” and “Sweet” to describe the “fruit of Deceit”. This description would imply that man couldn’t resist the temptation to deceive everyone around whether it is to impress people by masking your true qualities, or features to serve their own selfish desires. The tree that Blake is referring to is the tree, which bears the fruit that grants the knowledge of good and evil to the person who consumes it. Here, we can suppose that he is making a reference to Adam and Eve.

Focusing on “The Raven”, as we know it symbolizes many things, such as death, pestilence, filial gratitude and affection, wisdom, hope, longevity and fertility, but we can say that this poem most likely relates the Christian’s out look on ravens. Christians believed ravens carried off the souls of the damned therefore associating the raven with the Fall of Man and Satan, the one how dulls sinner’s moral senses, blinds them, and feasts on their corruption. This would mean these characteristics would be the downfall of man, damning them for eternity.

“And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade”.

(Stanza 5, “The Human Abstract”).

In the final stanza we are given an image of the “Gods” (the Earth and Sea), which can be likened to man, searching in vain for this tree of knowledge. Only at the end do we realise that because this tree grows in the human brain. If we have read the Bible or we know something about it, we could explain that in the Bible the tree is the knowledge of good and evil, which suggests that all men can choose to do good or evil things. This part of the poem go us back to the first stanzas in which man can choose to create peace, goodness, and equality in the world.

“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”.

(Stanza 6, “The Human Abstract”).

Finally, as a conclusion of the poem putting all stanzas together, we can think that Blake wants to make us a reflection and tries to propose the question of why, Why this vicious cycle of realization, forgiveness, humility, and deceit is so common. The answer would be: “There grows one in the Human Brain”. It is human nature for all of these things to occur. It is not an act of the devil or an act of God, or caused by any other force. So we as humans are inclined to take risks.

2. Structure of the poem.

The poem is formed by quatrains and these quatrains are formed at the same time by a group of four verses. The quatrains also receive another more specific name in poetry, which is “stanza”. Stanza in modern poetry is the same that “the strophe”, but we use this term in a more general sense. For this reason, we say that the strophe is a pair of stanzas of alternating form on which the structure of a given poem is based. According to this, this poem has a structure formed by six stanzas, which are divided in four verses and because of the poem will have twenty-four verses in total.

Referring to the rhythm and rhyme of the poem appears “the couplet”. It is a pair of lines of verse that form a unit. Poetry in rhyming couplets is one of the simplest rhyme schemes: aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, etc. In order to this, the verses or the couplets of “The Human Abstract” are AA, BB, in a rhyming sense because the first and the second verse are always AA and the third and fourth verse are always BB.

For example:

Pity would be no more, (a) -6
If we did not make somebody Poor; (a)- 8
And Mercy no more could be, (b)-6
If all were as happy as we;(b)- 6

On the other hand, talking about the rhythm of the poem, in verse, “a foot” is the basic unit of meter used to describe rhythm. A foot consists of a certain number of syllables forming part of a line of verse. It is described by the character and number of syllables it contains: in English, feet are named for the combination of accented and unaccented syllables, but is not the same in all languages.

This poem is written by hexameters in which each foot is short. Although, there are some verses that have more than six syllables. The rhyme of this last syllables is assonance because we find the repetition of vowel sounds within a short passage of this verses. For example:

And mutual fear brings peace,
Till the selfish loves increase;
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

3. Rhetorical Figures in the poem.

We can say that this poem is very rich in this sense because we find symbolism, paradoxes and personification.

The most predominant figure in this poem is the symbolism. A symbol, in its basic sense, is a conventional representation of a concept or quantity; i.e., an idea, object, concept, quality, etc. In more psychological and philosophical terms, all concepts are symbolic in nature, and representations for these concepts are simply token artefacts that are allegorical to (but do not directly codify) a symbolic meaning, or symbolism. Spoken language, for example, consists of distinct auditory tokens for representing symbolic concepts (words), arranged in an order, which further suggests their meaning.

In this poem the author chooses some of animals of nature together with the Human abstract qualities to show us the meaning of the poem. In order to this, we find in the poem the symbolism of the “rive”, which as we have said before, it represent some beliefs of the Christian religion meaning death and if man has to be bad will be the rives which will take his soul out. Also we see here the negative connotation that this bird has to people meaning bad things and corruption always. We also have the apparition of the “catterpiller” and “ fly” symbolising the mystery. As the poem says: “Feed on the Mystery”, meaning that they are the animals that represent it into the nature (and sometimes into the human’s head). There is another object, which is not mentioned in the poem, but there is a reference of it. This object is the “red apple” or as the poem says: “The fruit of the Deceit Ruddy and Sweet to eat”. With this definition we can understand that this fruit symbolises the deceit making also a reference of the temptation and deceit of Eva.

Here, in this poem, maybe also in others that belong to Blake, we can appreciate that the symbolism that he uses is related with religion and the Bible. This is very characteristic on Blake and later we will explain why.

Referring to paradoxes, using apparently contradictory ideas to point out some underlying truth, we find into the poem may of them, as for example: “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”; (Stanza 1, “The Human Abstract”). Here, we find that if we want to be pity, we will need to make someone unhappy and also, we have to be poor if we want to mercy of the others. Apparently, the first quality needs the other and this could seem a contradiction, but this is what we call a paradox.

Personification is the attribution of personality to some impersonal object. In this way, we find that the author attributes personality to Cruelty, Humility and Mystery. We affirm that because they are abstract qualities of the humans and for this reason they do not realise any action. However in the poem they are able to make roots (Humility), to have shadow (Mystery) and finally, the skill to lay a trap (Cruelty).

4. William Blake and his Poetry.

To introduce us better in William Blake poetry and to try to understand his way of writing, we need to know some things about his life events, his style of writing, his thoughts, beliefs, philosophical minds and very important his religion’s mind etc.

He was not a professional poet or man of letters, but earned his living, sometimes very precariously, as an engraver. Insofar as he had any public reputation during his lifetime, it was as a failed, eccentric painter. Almost unknown, however, were what are widely (and rightly) now regarded as his most important achievement, a series of visionary poems culmination in three brief or foreshortened epics, works demonstrating probably the greatest conceptual power ever to appear among poets (Romantic Poetry and Prose 1973).

To comprehend Blake (Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, Romantic Poetry and Prose, 10-11), his readers need to understand how Blake reads the Bible and Milton, or as Blake might have said, how to read poetry. Blake was primarily and intellectual revisionist, even a Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, in the longest perspective, seem most important as revisionists of the European Enlightenment. Blake, like major Romantics after him, sought to correct the Enlightenment, and not to abolish it. He had no quarrel with reason itself but only with inadequate accounts of reason, and he refused to distinguish between “the intellectual powers” and what called “the Real Man Imagination”, who’s most complete expression was in the arts of poetry and painting. The Bible, whose degree of historical validity was quite irrelevant to Blake, represented for him the Great Code of Art, the total form of what he called the Divine Vision, which he believed to have been so obscured by the nightmare of history as to be all but totally darkened in his own time.

All of Blake’s work is based on a firm distinction between what is imaginative and what is merely natural in us, with the natural rejected, cast out beyond the balance of what Blake termed “contraries”.

The revolt of the heart against the head he pungently characterize as “reasoning from the loins in the unreal forms of Beulah´s Night,” Beulah being a lower paradise of illusory appearances.

He hoped to rescue English culture from what he interpreted as its decadence, by restoring poetry to what it had been in Milton and the Renaissance writers before Milton, and by raising English painting to what it had never been, the spiritual art of Michelangelo and Raphael.

Yet Blake’s own genius was curiously divided. As poet and as painter he excels as a caricaturist, an intellectual satirist, and a master of a new kind of vitalizing but ironic parody.

Talking about their most important qualities as a writer (Jordi Doce, Los Bosques de la noche, 21), we can underline their irrationalism and their obsession by purity. In his poems and other writings, he tries to rise up the fight very present between the faith and reason. He defines the reason as “an satanic instrument and a destructive fruit that becomes the human in a prisoner of an abstract mind” (“Urizen”: your reason). Blake always thinks about the political of the individual (Men as the same like God lives in a Universe with a constant fight).

As we have said before, a very characteristic of Blake, which distinguishes him from others writers is his relation with the religion and the read of the Bible. The beginning of the access to the vernacular Bible in the 16^th century permits the co-existence of different lectures about itself and in this way, appears the respect of these diverse interpretations and also free readings. According to this, in this revolutionary time, Blake puts out the needed to subordinate the human’s existence into abstract principles. These abstract principles are the existence of God: “Each man is God and his life is fruit of the God’s Glory meaning that God is the Eternity”(Los Bosques de la noche, 28). He believes that the product of originality is one the most important sings of a creative person and who produces this is God because he also is an artist.

An artist has imagination or fantasy and Blake gives them a lot of importance because he affirms that they represent the eternity. As we have said before, with the statement of Human as a fruit of God, Blake defines that a poet is somebody who has a supreme power and this power is the fantasy which everyone has inside because is God who lives inside of him and he is a poetic genius (Luis Cernuda trans. Matrimonio del Cielo y de la Tierra, 18-19). This affirmation could become into a problem, because not everybody have the same point of view like Blake, but he resolve this problem with faith, the faith of his own religion, the religion that has created by himself. Blake creates a new mythology reforming old beliefs and concepts. So, this is one of the things that make him unique in his time writing. He also gives to the nature negatives connotations in contrast with his contemporaries because he thinks that the nature is a dead nature within human must to impose his power. Furthermore, he thinks that nature is a world of appearance, which separates man from his individual and internal God and invites him a world of corruptions and temptations.

Finally, to try to explain better the Cosmo-vision of William Blake, the poet Kathleen Raine shows us a scheme about a Blake’s work called “The Four Zoas”, in which she explain the importance of the four attributes that Blake gives to Human as resemblance with God: “ They are four: Urizen (Reason), Luvah (Love), Tharmas (Sensuality) and Los (the visionary intuition). Each of them has an first aspect, which is eternal, and other temporal aspect, which is a result of this first aspect called “spectre”. Blake put these four “Zoas” in a place of conflict between two differentiate sides: one is the God that we have inside of ourselves, the God that each person imagines that inhabit into this World and the other is the Evil (Jordi Doce, Los Bosque de la nohe, 38-39). As we can see here, this fight among good and bad, God and Evil, correct and incorrect, etc. is present into the Blake poems and also into the poem that we have analysed before “The Human Abstract”.

5. Blake as a Romantic poet.

English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is taken as extending from Blake’s earliest poems (printed in 1783) up to Tennyson’s first public volume (1830). These dates are arbitrary and, to some extent, now traditional. Romantic poetry in English does not end with the young, unhappy poets of the 1820´s, but continues its complex course through Victorian and modern poetry. Romanticism has to tend to emphasize the movement’s emotional naturalism, its supposed return to feeling, to folk traditions, to stories of the marvelous and supernatural. Romanticism was a health-restoring revival of the instinctual life, in contradistinction to eighteenth-century restraints that sought to sublimate the instincts in the united names of reason and society. By demanding more of natural love and of sensuous beauty than these could afford, the High Romantics each in turn attained a crisis in the instinctual life that could be over-come only by a yielding up of the instinctual life to a fully self-conscious creative mind. By a profound irony, the most heroic exalters of human emotion became responsible for an enormous sacrifice of instinct upon the altar of imaginative form.

Blake considers the human heart was a hopeless labyrinth of “selfish virtues”. The outward creation, he asserted, was hindrance to him, not action, no part of him. His strenuous enterprise seeks to burn away every context - conceptual, societal, and natural – that limits the human from becoming the Divine. To Blake, (Harold Boolm and Trilling, Romantic Poetry and Prose, 7) nature’s final form is a mythological triple Whore, whom he called Rahab, Vala, Tirzah, or secrecy, illusive beauty, necessity. Blake saw in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man continually, and for Blake the Natural Man was at enmity with God.

6. Bibliography.

- Bloom, Harold & Trilling, Lionel. “The Oxford Anthology of English Literature”: Romantic Poetry and Prose. Ed. Oxford University Press, 1973.

- Cernuda, Luis y Capurro, Soledad tradc. William Blake: Matrimonio del Cielo y el Infierno. Ed. Visor Libros, 2003.

- Doce, Jordi tradc. William Blake: “Los Bosques de la Noche”. Ed. Pre-Textos, 2001.