The Human Abstract (E)

Question 1

What is the poem’s message?

Answer 1

• The poem asserts that the Christian values of Pity, Mercy, Love and Peace require/presuppose a world of suffering and injustice.
• So, too, do the virtues represent a kind of passive and resigned sympathy that registers no obligation to alleviate suffering or create a more just world. The speaker therefore refuses to think of them as ideals, reasoning that in an ideal world of universal happiness and genuine love there would be no need of them.

Question 2

How does it contrast ‘The Divine Image’ (I)?

Answer 2

The poem begins as a methodical critique of the touchstone virtues that were so praised in “The Divine Image.” Proceeding through Pity, Mercy, and Peace, the poem then arrives at the phrase “selfish loves.” These clearly differ from Love as an innocent abstraction, and the poem takes a turn here to explore the growth, both insidious and organic, of a system of values based on fear, hypocrisy, repression, and stagnation.

Question 3

What does the narrator posit is the result of these ideals?

Answer 3

The result is a grotesque semblance of the organic, a tree of ‘Cruelty’, rooted in ‘Humility’, shrouded in ‘Mystery’, that grows nowhere in nature but lies sequestered secretly in the human brain