William Blake, "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 a forgèd Iron,
The Human Form, a fiery Forge,
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd,
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.


Blake has a way of making his statements seem inarguable. The repetition here has an incantatory power that almost compels us to agree, at least for the time we are inside the little world made by this poem.  It speaks of an evil so deeply entrenched in our nature that it is inescapable. Freedom from this evil is impossible for us, since it is created by our very nature-- the "Forge" is our "Form."  This image of a fiery forge, a kind of eternal, infernal smithy, appears in other poems from Blake's Songs of Experience:  the furnace and anvil of "The Tyger," the "mind-forg'd manacles" of "London."   Blake seems haunted by the clanging of this timeless industry, which he finds behind not only man-made constructions, but the natural world as well.

The circular structure of the poem creates its feeling of inevitability.  The first stanza presents these four aspects of human nature, its heart, face, form, and dress; then the second stanza reverses and mirrors the order-- landing us back where we started, at "The Human Heart," which is now revealed to be a "hungry Gorge."  The rhyme of "Forge" and "Gorge" is so perfect, it seems fated.  The heart is forever hungry, insatiable.  The circle can never end.