And tune your merry notes.
“The Island in the Moon” furnishes grotesque instances, such as that of old Corruption dressed in yellow vest. In “The Divine Image,” from the “Songs of Innocence,” while commonplace virtues are personified, the simple direct manner of the process distinguishes them from their prototypes in the earlier moral and didactic poetry of the century:
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity a human face
And Love, the human form divine
And Peace the human dress.[233]
An instance of personification raised to a higher power is found in Blake’s letter to Butts[234] beginning
With Happiness stretch’d across the hills,
In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils,
whilst elsewhere personified abstractions appear with new epithets, the most striking example being in “Earth’s Answer,” from the “Songs of Experience”: