The Garden of Love
By William Blake
I went to the Garden of Love, *capitalisation may be ref. Garden of Eden
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut, * religion is prohibitive
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, regimented
And binding with briars, my joys & desires. (briars=thorns)
In this poem a child visits a garden where he used to play only to find it transformed
into a graveyard. Blake’s use of imagery is characteristically open to interpretation in
this poem.
Both the literal and figurative meanings are alarming and disturbing. It can be inferred
that Blake is conveying the notion that institutional religion not only fails to nurture
love; it replaces love’s living space with prohibition and death. The poem depicts an
old, remembered freedom, a green where the speaker “used to play” having been
usurped by a structure that restricts desire and renames pleasure as sin.
With the words “Thou shalt not” Blake uses Biblical Allusion to give a God-fearing
depth to the prohibitory notice that he is confronted with. Blake replicates verbatim the
imperative component of the Ten Commandments received by Moses on Mount Sinai
.
The final image is one of stark repression: “Priests in black gowns” patrol the grounds,
actively “binding with briars, my joys & desires.” Images of imprisonment and binding
recur throughout the songs; they are indicators of the lamentable state of the world as
Blake saw it, one in which people are controlled and subjugated. In London even the
great river Thames has been restricted by the hand of man; just like the streets, it too
is chartered. In The Chimney Sweeper, the children are, “locked up in coffins of black”,
the physically restrictive space of the chimney becoming a metaphorical
representation of control and oppression. In Infant Sorrow Blake presents a vignette of
a child’s birth. The newborn is “struggling” and “striving” against his father, and at the
end of the poem “bound and weary” it gives up hope.
The central idea of the poem can thus be interpreted as a poignant lament for the loss of
natural liberty and the suppression of human desire by restrictive religious and societal
By William Blake
I went to the Garden of Love, *capitalisation may be ref. Garden of Eden
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut, * religion is prohibitive
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, regimented
And binding with briars, my joys & desires. (briars=thorns)
In this poem a child visits a garden where he used to play only to find it transformed
into a graveyard. Blake’s use of imagery is characteristically open to interpretation in
this poem.
Both the literal and figurative meanings are alarming and disturbing. It can be inferred
that Blake is conveying the notion that institutional religion not only fails to nurture
love; it replaces love’s living space with prohibition and death. The poem depicts an
old, remembered freedom, a green where the speaker “used to play” having been
usurped by a structure that restricts desire and renames pleasure as sin.
With the words “Thou shalt not” Blake uses Biblical Allusion to give a God-fearing
depth to the prohibitory notice that he is confronted with. Blake replicates verbatim the
imperative component of the Ten Commandments received by Moses on Mount Sinai
.
The final image is one of stark repression: “Priests in black gowns” patrol the grounds,
actively “binding with briars, my joys & desires.” Images of imprisonment and binding
recur throughout the songs; they are indicators of the lamentable state of the world as
Blake saw it, one in which people are controlled and subjugated. In London even the
great river Thames has been restricted by the hand of man; just like the streets, it too
is chartered. In The Chimney Sweeper, the children are, “locked up in coffins of black”,
the physically restrictive space of the chimney becoming a metaphorical
representation of control and oppression. In Infant Sorrow Blake presents a vignette of
a child’s birth. The newborn is “struggling” and “striving” against his father, and at the
end of the poem “bound and weary” it gives up hope.
The central idea of the poem can thus be interpreted as a poignant lament for the loss of
natural liberty and the suppression of human desire by restrictive religious and societal
