Human Abstract – IOP Script William Blake was a mystic. Blake’s poetry and artworks are entrenched with intrinsic obscurity, evoking inexplicable and eccentric thoughts within the reader. He embedded new and intellectual concepts into his work; ideas that not many people, until recently, have had the courage to dig deep into. Portraying the tensions between human and divine, The Human Abstract highlights human’s abstract reasoning that is destructive of joy and stimulates the arise of false virtues. Written in a didactic and objective tone, Blake heightens both the true barbaric intentions of the church and the relativity of the virtues. Overall, human’s abstract reasoning and false virtues stimulate the growth if a grotesque tree that lies …show more content…
Blake underlines the unjust and uncompassionate institutionalized religion as a human construct. Blake suggests that the origins of such social ills are forged by divided selfhood, creating a ‘God’ and social order in their own image. Poem is a remarkably ambitious examination of institutionalized virtues and its progressive enrichment. Blake epitomizes the reasoning through…Man only sees the portion of existence that is comprehendible to his corporeal understanding. Man is unable to apprehend the quintessential idea that virtue is equal to vice; for virtue cannot exist if there is no vice. The abstraction of these virtues from the corpus of divine, instigate selfishness and hypocrisy. So what needs to be attacked is man’s own thinking process: his assumption that the tree of mercy lay only in the mind of others. This cancerous tree is the real disease. Through the ‘Human Abstract’ Blake refers to the Tree as an embodiment of enslavement. Moral virtue, created by selfhood, is the abstraction of man from the divinity. The perverted, enslaved human brain desires and accepts the poverty and suffering inherent in the world. Blake relies heavily on attitude and adjectives intrinsic in the