DIVINE IMAGES
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Cruelty Has A Human Heart from Ten Blake Songs
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 forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: The Divine Image from Ten Blake Songs
- William Blake
THE DIVINE IMAGE
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all music love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
- William Blake
WILLIAM BLAKE: The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun
As I’ve worked on this essay in my apartment in the midst of a citywide curfew here in San Francisco, after having spent the afternoons protesting the murderous brutality of the police against black men, these poems and Vaughan Williams’ accompanying music – which brings them even more vividly to life – feel as relevant as ever. While all ten of these songs in Vaughan Williams’ cycle have a relevance to today, none are more timely than these two, as we work to recognize and combat the dangerous divisions in our society.
The rampant xenophobia and racism that permeates society feels like a perversion. Yet it is not. It is part of what it is to be human. It is humanity acquiescing control to the shadow Blake describes: Fear, which leads to jealousy, deception, and cruelty.
Surely these are acts of deception and cruelty: an allegedly terrified white woman blatantly lying as she reports to the 911 dispatcher that she is being threatened by a black man in New York City’s Central Park; a white police officer suffocating an unarmed black man for nearly 9 minutes with his knee on his throat while three other officers hold him down, as he repeatedly tells them that he can’t breathe; the president of a nation that calls itself the “Land of the Free” ordering the military to use chemical weapons on a band of demonstrators who are exercising their right to freedom of speech so that he can pose for a photo op that he hopes will help him jealously guard his office.
I hesitate to meditate on this moment through the art of a white man, but I’ve been on this journey with Blake for several months, and I can’t help but see the pertinence of these poems in the present moment. In that spirit, I share the below thoughts in continuation of this mini-essay project about the intersection of the music of Vaughan Williams and Blake’s poetry. I’ve been working my way up to this essay, already wanting to highlight the importance of these two pieces to our times from the outset of this project. America, doing what she seems to do best, has provided a complicated, difficult moment for reflection, just in the nick of time.
When James and I filmed these songs, we did so for a live audience at a friend’s warehouse space in the Bayview district of San Francisco, inviting them to an experimental way of experiencing music. Our audience that night certainly had some classical music industry friends in it, but it also contained a large number of people who had almost no connection or serious exposure to classical music at all. They simply came to our little warehouse salon concert because they knew one of us or were friends with our friends. Intellectually and artistically curious, they came not knowing what to expect, but up for an adventure.
During a break between songs towards the end of the concert, a woman sitting in the back raised her hand and asked the question so few of us in classical music seem to have the courage to ever ask of ourselves: “Why? Why are you interested in performing these songs now?” Her question could not have been more timely, as she asked the question just before I was about to launch into Vaughan Williams’ haunting a cappella setting of The Divine Image.
For me, this song and its partner, A Divine Image, are the reason to do this cycle of songs. It’s easy to understand why Blake was so grossly underappreciated in his own time – his poetry and his artwork both demand that we sit with humanity’s shadow and confront the reality of it head on. When I first was learning these songs, it was not long after September 11, 2001. Lines like “All must love the human form / In heathen, Turk, or Jew” jumped out to me in the climate of intense islamophobia that was freshly blazing throughout the country in the aftermath of that horrible day, feeding the United States’ burning desire to lead modern-day Crusades in the Middle East. That timelessness and urgency has never abated.
Part of the point of Blake’s poem is that there is more that binds us together than divides us. We need not fear each other so much. There need be no “other”. As Blake mystically argues, there is divinity to humankind, and it lies in human connection and the love, mercy, and compassion we all contain within us. If only we could realize that it is from each other we are pleading for these very virtues, therein lies our potential for true peace. Not realizing it, our monstrous mirror image, the one of the first Divine Image poem, with its cruel heart, its envious visage, and its fearsome form dressed in lies and deceit will continue to lead us.
Importantly, Blake also knew his audience was one of privilege. He was writing for upper class, white, Christian citizens of an empire which ruled much of the globe. At the end of The Divine Image, he urges them to use their privilege to lift up the downtrodden, to embrace those they fear the most. Today, that message takes other forms: all lives can’t matter until black lives matter.
What if, instead of giving into cruelty, jealousy, deception and terror, we invested in mercy, compassion, peace and love? What if we took the trillions we spend on arming our police so that they can imprison, torture and kill people of color and instead spent it on taking care of sick and infirm, feeding and housing our hungry and poor, and properly educating our young? Would we need such a militarized force to roam our streets? Some think this kind of militarization is necessary, because they live in terror of some sort of imagined “other”. The monster we should truly fear is the one with a heart full of cruelty and a terrified soul that lives inside each and every one of us.
This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS, and was made possible in part through a grant from SAN FRANCISCO FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC / INTERMUSIC SF.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects