William Blake - The Garden of Love Flashcards
What does the irregular rhyming pattern of the last stanza emphasise?
The death and decay that have overtaken a place that once used to hold such life and beauty for the speaker.
What is the implication of “Thou shalt not,”?
That organised religion is intentionally forbidding people from enjoying their natural desires and pleasures.
What is Blake frustrated with in this poem?
A religious system that would deny men the pleasures of nature and their own instinctive desires.
What does Blake see this religion as?
A demand that human beings reject their created selves to conform to a more mechanistic and materialistic world.
Argue that Blake isn’t denouncing religion.
He longs for the days when religion was a joyous experience, lamenting the fact the it is the church (chapel) that limits thee joys.
What psychological passage is marked in this poem?
From childhood innocence (freedom, joy) to adult experience (rules and the machine of life).
What could the narrators ‘joys and desires’ be?
Sexual pleasures he is denied by the rule-bound morality of the church.
Sum up Blakes poem.
Unless we can develop our creative imagination to replace that lost innocence, we will lose the essence of life itself.
What does the ‘Garden of Love’ correspond to?
Garden of Eden, an earthly paradise full of beauty and established because of God’s love so that love and happiness among his creatures might flourish.
