The Human Experience Through William Blake's "The Divine Image" and John Keats's "Ode on Melancholy"

The Romantic period of literature, although not entirely unified, focused largely upon a meditative description of life that focused largely on loss as an inevitable part of the human condition and experience. There is an overall sense of melancholy that life leads to the loss of what one values most and, furthermore, that what is lost can never be attained again. William Blake and John Keats both express this motif in their poems, which both address feelings of sorrow. Blake's "The Divine Image" of experience opposes its innocence counterpart in illustrating the fall of humanity in which idealistic peace and love of "of innocence is lost to the cruelty and terror of experience. According to John Keats's "Ode on Melancholy," however, the feelings of experience are not necessarily bad. Keats illustrates the fact that joy and pain are inseparable and cannot be escaped, and while tragic, life's value lies in all the experiences and emotions, good and bad.

Opening with "…Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love," (1) Blake's "The Divine Image" of innocence immediately sets a positive tone for these "virtues of delight" (3) are "our father dear" "(6). The repetition of this opening line emphasizes its presence and truth. It is established at the very beginning that goodness "Is God" and "Is Man, his child and care" (7-8) which likens man to God himself, thus establishing that man is made in God's image. Blake goes on to emphasize the existence of these virtues in man , equating each with a part of man, most notably that love has "the human form divine" (11). Thus, when man "prays in his distress" (14), he is praying "to the human form divine" (15) for God is in every man, "heathen, Turk, or Jew" (18), with no exception. The idealistic and lyrical lines express Christian virtues that are manifestations of God in man, and thus all men are themselves good and divine, regardless of faith or color.

The five stanzas of "The Divine Image" of innocence are condensed into two bluntly disparaging and dark stanzas in its experience counterpart. "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love" are replaced by cruelty, jealousy, terror, and secrecy, with terror taking the place of love as "the Human Form Divine" (3). The repetition of the virtues in the innocence poem is reaffirming and positive but in the experience version, the order of the words in the lines is inverted in the second stanza. Unlike in the innocence version, man here is seen in terms of fire, emptiness and coldness. What was once the mercy, pity, love, and peace in the dress, form, and face has become "forged Iron," "fiery Forge," and "Furance seal'd," all images of heat, fire, and doom, alluding to hell. Moreover, the human heart is said to be "its hungry Gorge" (5-10), which expresses raw greed and the discontent and desire that exists in man, who is no longer likened to God. The values and faith emphasized in the poem of innocence are not even referenced, for they are lost forever with experience and leave only bleakness in mankind.
Analogous to Blake, Keats clearly understands the sadness of the state of man. The first stanza of "Ode on Melancholy" is wholly devoted to what should not be done in the face of sadness. The sufferer should not "go to Lethe" (1), the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology to forget or think to suicide, as in the allusions to various poisons of Prosperine. Moreover, the suffer should not become obsessed with objects of death, for objects that invoke images of death such as "the death-moth" will only help to sustain sorrow and pain. The speaker then moves on to suggest that the sufferer, afflicted with "the melancholy fit," overwhelm his sorrow with natural beauty such as "a morning rose," "on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave," or to "feed deep, deep" into the "peerless eyes" of his mistress (19-20).

Keats initiates a change in tone in the last stanza away from the instructive voice in the previous lines. Beginning with "She dwells with Beauty," in which the speaker speaks of pain, for the "She" is melancholy itself. Melancholy, then, and is intertwined with a "Beauty that must die" and "Joy, who hand is ever at his lips" (21). The speaker suggests that pain and pleasure are interwoven by nature and that joy and pleasure are fleeting, "turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips" (24), for it cannot exist without pain. One finds the shrine of Melancholy while in the search of joy in the "temple of Delight," (25). However, once one bursts" Joy's grape against his palate fine" (29) he will inevitably "be among her cloudy trophies hung" (30). There cannot be joy without sadness and it is the tragedy destiny of humankind to seek the mysterious goddess who turns out to be none other but melancholy who reveals only the taste of "the sadness of her might" (29). The pleasure of joy and happiness will unavoidably come to an end that just as beauty inevitably dies but this is what makes the experience what it worthwhile for is the contrasts of joy and pain that make the human experience.

All that is valued to be good and desired is ephemeral and lost in "The Divine Image" and in "Ode to Melancholy," emphasizing the Romantic notion that it is a part of the human condition to experience loss and that it is simply inescapable. While Blake is much darker in his view of mankind's fall from innocence into the dark reality of experience, Keats also expresses the pain and reality of the fleeting nature of happiness and joy but points out that both emotions are what make the human experience what it is. Nevertheless, there is a consensus that, indeed, life leads to an eventual loss of what one values, just as man fell from the bliss of innocence to the sadness and pain of experience.