read as if one of the Swedenborgian 'Angels' were speaking." He notes a change in tone, however, in the second stanza where "Blake quickly drops the angelic mask and converts the two remaining divine attributes of Innocence to something overtly sinister." For Hirsch, the primary myth which Blake is responding to is that of Genesis, and the strongest link to that myth is "association of the tree with the Fall." Hirsch, like Bloom, is interested in clarifying the meaning of the title: "Blake calls this image a 'Human Abstract' because it is the history of an illusion. The tree of religion is an entirely human invention, like Locke's philosophy." He argues that Blake's opposition to this abstraction is Nature, and interprets the last line to mean, "among ot her things," that "the 'Human Brain' can choose to make the world the glorious place it implicitly is, or can create a falsely isolated and therefore fallen world." In 1966, D.G. Gillham also reads this poem satirically, but focuses on the speaker (whom he refers to as "the liar") as the object of that satire . He examines the axioms in the poem, contending that "the two axioms of the first s tanza were 'truths' told with a wrong emphasis, designed to make men easy about exploitation." With the third axiom, however, the liar is able to "feel quite easy about advantage and exploitation for it insists on the necessity of 'mutual fear.'" Gillha m suggests that the poem experiences an abrupt shift in tone after the first six lines, and that, "in the remainder of the poem Blake uses the image of the growth of a tree to describe the advanced stages of deception." Unlike Hirsch, Gillham does not lo cate Blake's (or the Bard's) voice in the second half of the poem, rather, the speaker remains the liar, and, for this reason, the invocation of "Nature" represents "a form of self-deception." He argues that "Blake exposes the concealed claim made by the mystery-mongers of 'nature' that their suppo...
