The Garden of Love Flashcards
Introduction
‘The Garden of Love’ was first published in 1794 and was one of the series of poems in William Blake’s collection, Songs of Experience. These short poems explore the harsh realities of late 18th and early 19th Century life during the time of King George III, known as the Romantic Era. Each poem in the Songs of Experience category is matched by an idealistic portrayal in Songs of Innocence. The contrast is Blake’s method of social protest. ‘The Garden of Love’ is a poem of erotic frustration that directly challenges the role of organised religion in dictating the expression of human desires.
Love is presented allegorically and the ‘Garden ’ is of course the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were allowed freedom of innocent and uninhibited sexual expression. In this poem, after the fall of humankind, the sexual act has become one of shame and repression.
Note that the poem begins in a Pastoral mode, with reference to a simple bygone age of closeness to nature, but ends with a Gothic and negative depiction of a graveyard.
The poem, The Garden of Love by William Blake, is the antithesis to The Echoing Green of Innocence, as it uses the same setting and rhythm to stress the ugly contrast. Blake firmly believed that love cannot be sanctified by religion. The negative commandments of the Old Testament, ‘Thou Shall Not’ could not enshrine the most positive creative force on earth. For Blake, sexuality and instinct is holy, the world of institutionalised religion turns this instinct into imprisonment and engenders hypocrisy. Those rules, which forbid the celebration of the body, kill life itself.
“love lay sleeping”
Blake introduces ‘Love’ as an allegorical figure, representing an emotion, extended over the entire poem. The key to what follows is introduced in the second line; ‘Love’ is sleeping and therefore humankind is bound to suffer.
“heard among the rushes dank / Weeping, weeping”
‘Dank’ means unpleasantly wet or cold. Because ‘Love’ was ‘sleeping’ the bank is devoid of the usual positive connotations; of joy in relation to the natural world.
The last line of the stanza comprises two words with the stress on the first syllable in ‘weeping’. This is trochaic construction, slow and emphatic, to highlight the grief caused by the inactive nature of ‘Love’.
“Then I went to the heath and wild / To the thistles and thorns of the waste”
Blake moves on to another setting, that of ‘the heath and the wild’, perhaps representing untamed and primitive desires. The alliterative ‘th’s of ‘heath’ ‘thistles’ and ‘thorns’ are difficult to say when spoken aloud, and this slows down the pace. The setting is presented as natural, but with no hint of anything sinister in its wildness
“how they were beguiled / Driven out, and compelled to the chaste”
These natural, wild plants had been ‘beguiled’, meaning in this context ‘deceived’. They clearly represent the natural, primitive, human sex drive, which had been repressed, forced into ‘the chaste’ or, we might say, ‘chastity’. In other words normal human sexuality has become ‘sinful’.
It is interesting to note that William Blake believed in free love; a man in advance of his time.
Similar to how he “used” to play - Past tense – he is no longer a child who plays
“I went to the Garden of love…A Chapel was built in the midst”
These natural, wild plants had been ‘beguiled’, meaning in this context ‘deceived’. They clearly represent the natural, primitive, human sex drive, which had been repressed, forced into ‘the chaste’ or, we might say, ‘chastity’. In other words normal human sexuality has become ‘sinful’.
It is interesting to note that William Blake believed in free love; a man in advance of his time.
Note that this middle stanza is a pivot. What happens before the stanza is the result of religious intrusion. What happens after is the explanation of the reason.
Youth is a time of innocence and unconscious sexuality. The green used to be a place of ‘play’ and freedom.
The Church of the time imposed rigid rules in relation to sexuality, and forced its repressive rules on uneducated people. They responded through guilt and fear. Blake believed that the source of all love was God, and emotions should grow naturally.
The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were
pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of
life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. [Genesis 2:9]
The other garden in the Bible is in the Old Testament poem ‘Song of Songs’, an erotic poem in which garden imagery is used as a metaphor for sexual enjoyment: Awake, north wind,
and come, south wind!
Blow on my garden,
that its fragrance may spread everywhere.
Let my beloved come into his garden
and taste its choice fruits.
[Song of Songs 4:16]
When Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, before what is known as ‘the fall of man’, they were able to love without shame or self-consciousness. The garden, therefore, was a place of innocent, uninhibited sexual expression.The garden in this poem, then, is more like Eden after the fall. Sexuality is surrounded by shame, repression and prohibition. It is sinful. This is also reflected in the way that Song of Songs was
reinterpreted: the religious system replaced a celebration of the goodness of sexuality with reasons for shame and repression.
The Garden holds great significance. As well as a sexual or romantic type of love, it could also be ‘Love’ (capital L), a first, primal love like that given to men from God. The ‘Garden’, then, could be a place within ourselves where we store this primal emotion – our own, internal, Garden of Eden. This is not a physical, but a spiritual, place. Our place of ‘innocence’. Blake,
though hostile to the Church,was a Christian.
He had never seen the chapel before so he enters the
world of ‘experience’ for the first time and is shocked at how his previous freedoms have literally been blocked by the church. - What has changed, the garden itself or the way he sees it? Could it be both?
What difference does it make to our interpretation?
The poet revisited the Garden of Love, open green piece of land where he used to play with boys and girls together. He was dismayed to see there what he had never seen earlier. He found that in the green open place, a Chapel (church) had been erected in the middle of the place were boys and girls together used to play. Institutionalised religion thus destroyed the Garden of Love. In the world of Experience, the harmony between man and nature no longer existed. Earlier the Garden of Love seemed to be in state of idyllic beauty, but the present day scenario of the place is one of utter sadness and gloom.
Consider that a chapel is completely unnatural. It’s shape is squarish and triangular, unlike the natural roundness of nature. In this setting, the Chapel is artificial, forced, and out of place. conveys William Blakes deep antipathy toward organized religion. William Blake was deeply religious, but he liked neither the church of England nor any type of organized religion. He felt the Church, in general, had perverted the real meaning of Christ’s love.
“gates of this chapel were shut”
The clergy of the established Church interpreted the Christian message not in terms of love but in terms of harshness and repression. So the gated Chapel is locked. What should have been a place of peace and prayer and a route to God’s love is a barrier.
Humans interpretation of religion has made it into a prison.
“Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion” - links to ‘The marriage of heaven and hell’ where in this quote he blames the existence of brothels directly on religion—and in the same breath as he discusses prisons. That’s not an accident. This proverb is calling religion out for its confining hypocrisy. Maybe if people weren’t so shamed into suppressing their natural urges, goes his argument, then we wouldn’t need prostitution in the first place.
shut - Structure: This line adds an extra syllable to the iambic tetrameter of the rest of the poem, stressing the corruption of the simplicity of the Garden by the Chapel.
The first rejection in the poem is that the hapel built in the garden might be acceptable; Love, after all, can lead to marriage and a chapel might be a welcome addition to such a garden. A chapel should also be open and welcoming. However, this one is closed and forbidding.
One cannot freely enjoy pleasure without permission from the Church.
“Thou shalt not, writ over the door”
The Ten Commandments comprises negatives and positives. The Church emphasised the negatives; the punitive side of religion, imposed restrictions and instilled a sense of guilt in many uneducated people. Blake was highly critical of what he saw as a distortion of the Christian message of love and use of religion as a form of social control.
Making the church exclusive, Blake could be referring to a church near where he lived which made people pay for pews, which he was very critical of.
“Thou Shalt Not” suggests the concept of private property, which is the source of all inequality and helplessness in society. The gate is closed to the passerby and on it is inscribed the warning ‘Thou Shalt Not’. The warning is emblematic of the classic dictum of the Old Testament God-Jehovah who is seen as a prohibitive and a vindictive tyrant.
It could be that earlier, the Garden presented the state of innocence where an environment of gaiety and mirth prevailed and everybody could enter the place without any discrimination whatsoever. But now it seems that the Garden has been lent or sold out to a private individual who exerts the sole authority and hence, the others are devoid of any joyous moment. The present day scene looks quite dismal where even such a simple resort as the garden is unable to escape the evils of industrialisation and subsequent phenomenon of private ownership.
We feel this is in reference to free love. In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve freely loved one another without any sense of shame. While in the original story of Eden eating the fruit of the tree gives Adam and Eve knowledge, in this case, the fall is a bit different. The Church in its attempt at creating control seems to outright destroy love. The church forbids it.
“filled with graves and tombstones where flowers should be”
Blake seeks a way to find love, so turns to this metaphorical ‘Garden’ however his void is insatiable
Colour/growth/life is replaced with grey/death.
The graves and tombstones could literally belong to unloved people who have died, failing to thrive because of their stunted emotional lives. Or the tombstones could represent the range of emotions and physical drives that have been suppressed and destroyed by the Church’s teaching.- however we must note how many have been destroyed (murdered) by the lack of religious teachings
The flowers represent the warmth and loving generosity of the human heart. These couldn’t grow because the emotions that nourish them have been killed, lying under the tombstones.
Note that the poem was written at the early stages of the Industrial Revolution when industrialists were motivated by material greed rather than care for their human employees. The mass destruction of nature and pollution was the result. Therefore, there is another layer of meaning to this poem. Blake was critical of the terrible exploitation of industrial workers.
The priests depict a total official manner devoid of any compassion or even forgiveness. This seems to be the basic factor that binds the narrator’s desires and joy.
When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit in the garden of Eden, they gained knowledge not only of carnal relations but death. There something almost poetic in learning about procreation and death simultaneously. Procreation becomes a duty so that death can be avoided. We stop loving just to spontaneously love, and we then procreate to avoid death, which we fear. Spontaneous love is replaced with moral responsibility and fear. William Blake feels this is wrong, and that the Church incorrectly is instilling these ideas. He feels the Church instils these values mostly for political control.
Blake wants to suggest that love is sufficient for us, and we are happier and better off when we simply love. We should not fear death, and then procreate solely out of moral responsibility. The Church has perverted the real Christian message, and Blake wants to reveal the true message to us in his poem.
utilises contrast to make the decay of his world blatant to the reader. Such contrasting is visible when the image of a life-giving garden decays into an image of death. This parallels the events that took place in Blake’s own life, when his rural home became swallowed up by urban sprawl.
“black gowns were walking their rounds”
This bleak description of the forbidding, joyless priests in their black garments is Blake’s way of expressing his disgust at the clergy’s lack of compassion. The rhythm of this line is, ironically, reminiscent of a nursery rhyme with the assonant rhyme of ‘gowns’ and ‘rounds’.
Blake is saying that expression of sexual desire is natural, even innocent, a manifestation of the way God created us. The Church and its clergy repress this and instil shame and guilt instead.
black represents dark, bleak and unimaginative
rounds implies a mechanical ritual or routine; they
methodically ‘bind’ desire and joy
Love has been superseded by control in the form of a shut chapel and “priests in black gowns”. These priests are not merely forbidding freedom and play, they are actively replacing the “sweet flowers” with briars.
The second rejection is that for Blake not only can Love not continue towards its desired end, it cannot be allowed at all. It has been killed by the priests whose only thought is to bury the former lovers under tombstones and destroy every vestige of freedom and joy.
“binding with briars my joys and desires”
Blake applies this negative and repressive teaching to himself. Believing as he did in free love, he feels his natural, loving ‘joys and desires’ — in other words his sexual drives — are restricted and suppressed. The ‘binding with briars’ is a metaphor for the distorted teaching of the Church, which generates pain rather than a sense of God’s love. It is also an obvious reference to Jesus’s crown of thorns, and therefore symbolises pain and humiliation.
Note that, like the previous line, Blake uses internal assonant rhyme in ‘briars’ and ‘desires’. To conclude the poem he abandons the rhyming structure to introduce a different and inventive construction that draws the attention of the reader.
This image links to the ‘crown of thorns’ worn by Jesus and therefore symbolises pain and humiliation.
Blake is suggesting that he suffers, as Christ suffered – but his suffering serves no higher purpose. Those subject to the tyranny of the Church are controlled
externally (as by the priests who patrol) but also internally through having been made to accept its teachings and modes of thought. Cf. ‘mind forged manacles’ (London) and ‘dark satanic mills’ (Jerusalem).
What we can conclude about the Chapel in this poem
- It is bounded by ‘gates’ that are ‘shut’
- It is a place where people are not free
to act (‘Thou shalt not’) - It is associate with the loss of life
(‘graves’) - Its priests wear ‘black’ uniforms and
patrol the grounds - They confine any initiative towards
freedom (‘binding… desires’) in a
potentially painful way (using ‘briars’)
Blake attended a church over which the opposite sign
was displayed:“Now everything is allowable.”
Structure
First stanza: ABCB
Second stanza: DEFE
Third stanza: internal rather than end rhyme - This stanza disrupts any sense of predictability. The internal rhyme slows the pace of the final two lines and echoes the speaker’s sense of confusion at what he has found in the garden: just as his/our expectations are confounded, so are our expectations of the rhyme
scheme. The double rhymes of the closing couplet reinforce how totally the speaker’s hopes have been crushed. Blake makes his point even more powerfully in the last two lines of the poem, in which the somewhat bouncy rhythm, with three stressed syllables in each line, is broken by introducing two lines with four stresses and internal rhymes, which have the effect of banging the point home with almost brutal ferocity.
Context
the poet rebels against the idea of original sin. Man was expelled for eating of the fruit of knowledge and, cast out of Eden, was shamed by sexuality. In the poem, the poet subverts orthodoxy and the patriarchal authority figures of the Nobodaddy and God and his Priests. The Dissenting tradition to which Blake’s family belonged believed in “inner light” and “the kingdom within”. Moral laws without any rationale are not to be obeyed. In ‘The Garden Love’, interfering priesthood and the powers of prohibition blight innocent affections. The Church of Experience like the King and State rely on such powers to ensure obedience. A contemporary reference linked with the poem is that of the Marriage Act of 1753, passed by Lord Hardwicke. These Acts stipulated that all marriages had to be solemnized according to the rules of the Church of England in the Parish Church of one of the parties in the presence of a clergyman and two witnesses.
With the loss of rural society and extended families in villages this legislation was perhaps necessary, especially in urban centers. However, for Blake this was equal to curbing individual freedom. For him, each prohibition created repression, therefore in The Garden of Love, we see a bleak, unproductive landscape of unfulfilled yearning where sterile resentment, fear, guilt and joylessness replace the open freedom of innocence.
This poem functions to brutally satirise both the oppression of the Church, which had a societal impact, and the urbanisation of Lambeth, which had a personal impact on Blake’s life.
This particular poem was written in 1793, shortly after Blake and his wife moved out of London to a house in an area known as Lambeth Marsh on the Thames River. This new home was surrounded by a large garden and rested in a relatively new development known as Hercules Buildings. Blake and his wife had relocated to Lambeth possibly because of its rural appearance, and Blake considered it to be his own Garden of Eden (Ackroyd 128). In “The Garden of Love,” the speaker mentions that the green on which he used to play is destroyed when a Chapel is built upon it. How exactly did the presence of the new Chapel ruin Blake’s serene garden? What is it that the Blakes “shalt not” do? In addition to the presence of the Chapel, other events were taking place in Hercules Buildings that may have impacted “The Garden of Love.” The poem has a sense of deterioration; the flowers turn into tomb-stones while the playful green becomes replaced by an ominous church.
In addition to the personal significance of this poem, Blake’s writings in the 1790’s were also focused on the impact the French Revolution had in England. Many liberties were repressed in England shortly after the British had declared war against the French (Reinhart 29). Though the British Government is not identified specifically in the verses of “The Garden of Love,” the Church is. Also, since I noticed that Blake’s other poetry and artwork contained deistic themes, I question his own religious upbringing. I assume Blake’s religious background has provoked the disdain toward the Church in “The Garden of Love.” The final line of the poem, “And binding with briars my joys and desires,” is a forceful statement. When I read this line, I thought of Blake’s creativity being bound by the vice-like grip of vines that encompass his house at Lambeth. Was Blake himself ever affected by censorship?
The happiness that was enjoyed by Blake and his wife when they first had escaped from London to Lambeth was shortly eradicated along with their neighborhood, Hercules Buildings. The process of decline Blake felt was happening could be physically represented by the urbanization of that era. The urbanization hit home for Blake in a number of ways. “Even as they moved to Lambeth, the area was changing” (Ackroyd 128). The completion of Blackfriars Bridge and Westminster Bridge opened up the Lambeth Marsh area to a massive influx of traffic. Fields were plowed over in the area to accommodate the increasing traffic. Other than the Chapel, I thought that when the speaker sees “what he had never seen,” it might have been in reference to Albion Mill. Albion Mill, the first great automated factory in England, was built on the outskirts of Lambeth while Blake still lived there. Construction of this massive mill represented the industrialization of England. Closer to the Hercules Buildings were newly constructed stone manufactories, a wine factory, and a blackening factory as well (128). As an artist and a print-maker, Blake worked with his hands and was therefore resentful toward the automation of industry. These infringements on Blake’s community were physical in nature, but the erection the South Lambeth Chapel on his street represented more than just a physical imposition.
Blake apparently believed the problem extended beyond the mere presence of the church. Both the church and the government of England during the French Revolution were repressing personal freedoms, and Blake felt that this was leading toward a decline in humanity. “In his poems of this era, Blake examines the fall of man” due to the loss of personal liberties (Reinhart 31). “The gates of this chapel were shut,” is a statement that portrays the ignorance of the Church at that time. Blake believes in the freedoms of desire, expression, and impulse; he is “open to joy and delight where ever beauty may appear” (Schorer 210). He felt his own natural impulses threatened by the oppressive authority of the Church. Thomas Butts, a friend of the Blakes, once visited their house at Lambeth and found them lying stark naked in their garden, reading passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost (Reinhart 29). With a Chapel near by, Blake’s “joys and desires” have been “[bound] by briars.” His joys and desires, in this case, may have been the outdoor fornication he has grown accustomed to. The flowers of the garden are significant in that they represent fruition of ideas. Church authority of the 1790’s “ignores all individuality by restraining natural impulses” (Schorer 204). The creativity of artists has been prohibited in this society, and without expression artists will be useful only for filling graves; providing “tomb-stones where flowers should be.”
Blake’s Lambeth decays the way he feels artistic impulse decaying under the shadow of the Church. “The Garden of Love” deals with Blake’s corner of a society that he feels is headed in the wrong direction. By exhibiting the way in which he personally has been affected by the oppressive nature of the Church, Blake represents the loss of liberty in a society that he feels is becoming bound by briars.
Personal comments
The Garden of Love is another allegorical poem satirical of the Church. It is an attack on the morality which puts restrictions on sexual love. The speaker finds that a great change has come over the Garden of Love. He finds that a field of activities which should be spontaneously enjoyed has been made ugly by the interference of religious notions which insist on man’s guilt and shame. The Church has spoiled the beauty and natural vigor of the pleasures which were once there to be enjoyed and substituted reminders of man’s morality and eventual corruption, which are consequences of sin.
In The Garden of Love, there is a strong condemnation of the Church in its approach to sexual matters, and it is difficult not to agree with the attack made by the poet.
In all religion, there is a tendency to elevate the spiritual at the expense of the physical, and in all religions there are sects which take this tendency to an extreme, viewing the promptings of the body as low, especially the sexual urge. The effect poem falls on this aspect as well as on the prohibitions imposed by the “Chapel”. “Thou Shalt Not” does more than restrict activity: it alters the complications of doubt and perplexity. The damage done by the “briars” is a self-imposed once they have been placed.
The speaker here relates a personal history: he talks of “my joys and desires” as being “bound”. He has now reached a position where he can see that what has been done to him was an evil. The tone of the poem is indignant, and the “priests in black gowns” are sinister figures. The obvious solution is to remove the evil by changing his notions about sexual matters and so liberating himself from the prohibitions imposed by the Chapel. But it may be too late for that.
