A 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 forgèd iron,The human form a fiery forge,The human face a furnace sealed,The human heart its hungry gorge.
About this text
A Divine Image is in the public domain. This text is taken from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Project Gutenberg ebook #1934; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: William Blake, A Divine Image, in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789–1794), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1934, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/blake-songs/a-divine-image.html, id L02911.
Form and metre
A Divine Image is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 88%). 85% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 7.9 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 2 -A-A iron · forgeA · sealed · gorgeA
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Cruelty has a human heart, | 7 | /˘··/˘· |
| And Jealousy a human face; | 8 | ·/˘˘·/˘· |
| Terror the human form divine, | 8 | /˘·/˘·˘/ |
| And Secrecy the human dress. | 8 | ·/˘˘·/˘· |
| The human dress is forgèd iron, | 8 | ·/˘···/˘ |
| The human form a fiery forge, | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| The human face a furnace sealed, | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
| The human heart its hungry gorge. | 8 | ·/˘··/˘· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.