Pity; the weak; the strong. When thinking of Blake's emblematic writings on pity, it would be impossible to begin anywhere other than with the two remarkable poems in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience which deal with pity in perhaps the most sustained, certainly the most memorable way: ‘The Divine Image’ from Songs of Innocence (1789) and ‘The Human Abstract’ from Songs of Experience (1789–94). Here is ‘The Divine Image’:

And here, in a poetic highly redolent of the contemporary hymns by which he was so ambiguously influenced, Blake establishes pity as an essential element in the continuous transaction between the divine and the human that was the continuing basis of his theology. There is little here that is troublesome: pity, as a trait (one might even say as an abstract concept, but that would be confusing) is un-ironic, it is a quality which manifests itself as an attribute of our dealings with other people and thus necessarily with God. If there is a discordant tone struck by this poem, one which may take it momentarily beyond the kind of song that might be sung by Sunday-school children – albeit on Holy Thursday perhaps – it occurs only in the last stanza, where the potentially divisive question of belief and conversion is blandly and skilfully elided into a broader view of tolerance.