A Moment of Real Mercy: Reflections on Blake’s The Human Abstract

This afternoon, I witnessed something that left a mark on my heart. I was sitting near a roadside mess in my town when I saw a physically challenged man trying to eat with great difficulty. His hands were trembling, and the food kept falling from his fingers. People around glanced at him and looked away, too busy with their own plates. But one woman sitting nearby, probably a daily wage worker, noticed his struggle. She quietly finished her meal, went to him, sat beside him like a mother, and started feeding him with her own hands.

There were no words exchanged, no camera, no crowd clapping just a pure act of kindness. It felt like I was witnessing something sacred. That simple scene reminded me of William Blake’s poem The Human Abstract.

In the poem, Blake talks about pity, mercy, and peace, but he also shows how these so called virtues often exist only because of suffering. We feel pity because someone is poor. We offer mercy because someone is weak. Blake even says that such virtues are sometimes rooted in human selfishness and hypocrisy.

But what I saw today made me question that. The woman didn’t gain anything by helping that man. She did it out of genuine care, like a mother who cannot bear to see her child suffer. It was not pity for the sake of pride, it was love.

Blake’s words made me reflect deeply, but this real moment made me believe that true compassion still breathes in our world. We just have to pause and notice it.

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