Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love -- Visually Brainstorming "The Divine Image"

by Glen Downey, Comics in Education, www.comicsineducation.com

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Probably the most distinctive feature of Blake's "The Divine Image" is the repetition of "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love," used to form a series of iambic tetrameter lines in Blake's beautifully structured ballad measure.

Nica's visual brainstorming looks at a variety of different features in the poem, including the personification of the various virtues and how it speaks them in a way diametrically opposed to their treatment in "The Human Abstract."

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With Nica's great insights, however, comes something that just makes your day--one of the neatest things I've seen a student do in a visual brainstorming activity dealing with poetry. That's right--she draws the four train cars of her own take on a "Quatrain":

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This is precisely why visual brainstorming is such a killer activity: it allows students in the course of the thinking and note-taking process to take the kinds of detours that lead to very cool, out of the box ideas.

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