The Garden of Love (experience )

Garden of Love symbolism and meaning of poem

• loss of natural world

• symbolises;

  • Edenic

  • prelapsarian world

  • innocence

  • purity

  • safety

  • desire

  • sexual freedom

  • harmony between humanity and nature

  • place of learning and spiritual growth

  • Opposes semantic field pf restriction seen throughout poem as it symbolises growth and fecundity

“saw what I never had seen”

shift - change in setting - psychological shift from innocence to experience

“A chapel was built in the midst”

symbolic of industrialised religion ruining the spiritual natural connection between earth and nature

“Where I used to play on the green”

Past tense - indicating a loss of something a shift

• green - allusion to ecchoing green - linking with the innocent childhood

“And the gates of this Chapel were shut”

gates - heavens gates - heaven as an internal state

• gates suggests restriction

• chapel - place of restriction and control

“Thou shall not”

10 commandments - these moral laws that Blake opposed as he believed they were controlling and shaming

“So many sweet flowers bore”

Flowers bore - hyperbaton stresses the fertility of the garden - introducing opposition of growth vs restriction

“And” x4

anaphora - quickens that pace of the poem - showing growing anger and frustration - rhyme scheme breaks down creates a dark ominous stanza through resentful and anxious voice

Lyric Poem

centres narrators feelings - bitter poem with ironic satire title showing anger

• tone of yearning of innocence that has been lost

“filled with graves”

• suggests overcrowding

• deathly imagery - metaphor for shame and repression

“Priests in black gowns”

priests - agents of oppression and control

shift in colour imagery - meta-shift in tone from innocence to experience

“Binding with briars”

alliteration

• briars = thorns of a rose - natural world subverted here to be controlling - perhaps showing how industrialisation has corrupted nature - authoritarianism

AO3 - Blake chapel built in Lambeth near his home

• built by subscription

• Blake appalled those who could not pay would be excluded from church

Harold Bloom - religion and confinement

“Blake forces us to confront a disillusionment with the Garden of Eden, where the authority of religious institutions has created not freedom but confinement and repression."

E.J.A Aitken quote - freedom of love

“the freedom of love has been replaced by the rigid laws and prohibitions of the church”