The Garden of Love by William Blake (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes
The Garden of Love by William Blake
Overview and context
William Blake's poem explores the relationship between religious institutions and human love. Written in 1789, the poem forms part of Blake's celebrated collection Songs of Innocence and Experience. The speaker returns to a childhood garden and discovers that it has been dramatically transformed by the presence of a chapel and priests. This transformation serves as a powerful critique of how organised religion can restrict natural human feelings and desires.
The poem is particularly significant within the Romantic movement. Blake uses simple language and form to convey a complex message about freedom, innocence, and the damaging effects of institutional control.
Unlike most poems in the anthology, which focus on romantic or familial love, this work concentrates on a geographical location and the emotions it evokes, making it distinctive in its approach.
Author context: William Blake (1757-1827)
Blake was an English Romantic poet born in London to Dissenter parents. Dissenters were Protestant Christians who separated from the Church of England during the 17th and 18th centuries, which significantly influenced Blake's critical perspective on organised religion. He received training in art and illustration from a young age, attending drawing school before continuing his studies at the Royal Academy. As an adult, he worked as an illustrator, painter and engraver, opening a print shop where some of his first poems were eventually printed.
Blake's spiritual beliefs were complex and deeply personal. He was devoutly religious in his own way, but he held strong reservations about organised religion and publicly expressed criticism of the Church of England. Many of his peers viewed him with suspicion because of these views, which are exemplified in this poem.
Blake found his inspiration in the Bible and other religious texts rather than in institutional Christianity. Although he didn't receive much recognition during his lifetime, Blake remains hugely influential in English poetry and visual arts, particularly within the Romantic movement.
Synopsis and summary
The poem recounts a speaker's return to a place called the Garden of Love, where they used to visit and play during childhood. Upon arriving, they discover the garden has changed significantly from their memories. The speaker finds it very different, filled with graves and closed to the public. A chapel has been newly built directly over the play area. As the speaker examines the garden, they experience a profound sense of dismay.
The gates of the chapel are closed, and a commandment reading 'Thou shalt not' is written on the door. The speaker physically turns to the garden from the chapel, but this can also be interpreted metaphorically as them shunning religion. The garden, which once bore sweet flowers, is now filled with graves, and tombstones have replaced the flowers. Priests dressed in black gowns are present, walking their rounds and binding the speaker's joys and desires with briars (prickly or thorny stems).
Detailed analysis
The poem's perspective and imagery
The poem explores the relationship between the speaker and their childhood garden from a unique angle. This perspective differs from most poems in the anthology, as the majority focus on either familial or romantic love. Instead, this work concentrates on a geographical location and the sentiments it holds for the speaker.
When Blake's speaker enters the Garden of Love, they find a chapel built there. The reader encounters religious imagery throughout. The gates of the chapel are closed, and a commandment is written on the door. The speaker continues to notice changes: the garden has become a graveyard, and flowers have been replaced by tombstones. The contrast between the past and present versions of the garden suggests vastly different ideas regarding love.
The poem depicts love that starts as something free or liberating but subsequently becomes associated with restriction and death.
Religious symbolism
Within the poetic tradition, gardens typically allude to certain religious imagery. Poets may recall the first biblical garden, the Garden of Eden, which was luscious and abundant and, according to the Bible, part of Paradise. Blake subverts this concept of the ideal garden in his poem, as the present garden appears as a bleak place associated with death.
Such depiction may reflect Blake's hatred of organised religion. This becomes especially evident in the richly symbolic contrasts within the garden. Blake uses these contrasts to amplify the difference between the Christianity-free past and the chapel-dominated present. Blake was a deeply spiritual artist and poet, but he disliked the institutions associated with religion.
The garden of love, formerly associated with play and carefree childhood, has now become the site of a chapel, representing a physical embodiment of the Church. Religious scholars often argue that religion can codify faith, and that through the process of codification, religion becomes less liberating. Blake appears critical of this process.
Narrative voice and universal themes
The poem employs a first-person narrative voice, suggesting a bittersweet tone regarding the state of the garden. The speaker feels nostalgic about how the garden used to appear in their childhood and seems sentimental about how it has changed. Readers can likely empathise with the unnamed speaker, drawing on their own sense of loss that accompanies the passage of time.
The lack of detail about the speaker's identity allows readers to universalise them, making the speaker become a symbol of wider humanity. This universality reinforces the argument that the poem addresses change, resistance to change, and loss as much as it concerns love and religion.
Major themes
Love
The central message of the poem suggests that organised religion acts as anathema to love. It imposes control and restrictions on people, killing happiness and curbing natural desires and wishes. The institutions of religion, unlike the joyousness of religious belief itself, transform the world from a garden (symbolising growth and life) into a grave (symbolising death and decay). Organised religion fails to achieve the ideals it attempts to adopt.
The poem positions religion against love, commenting on how organised religion (or the various denominations of Christianity, which would have been the only publicly acknowledged religions in England at the time) does not allow love to thrive or flourish. Instead, it places unnecessary restrictions on people's lives.
This restriction becomes evident in the unfinished command 'Thou shalt not' (line 6), which seems to suggest that Christianity or organised religion in general prohibits arbitrarily. Blake highlights how religion binds with rules and prevents people from embracing joy, desire and community.
These aspects of life are, according to the poem, both natural and important. This perspective holds significance because Blake was a highly individualistic thinker who challenged conventional ideas about religion at the time the poem was written. His work comments on wider society's adherence and conformity to established religious structures, which only focus on customs. The poem explores the barrenness of the land when love is lacking, through the bleak imagery of the 'tomb-stones' (line 10) and 'graves' (line 9).
Love, whether romantic, sexual or spiritual, represents something innate and fundamental to human existence. Yet in the poem, it faces threat from the dogma of organised religion. For example, the symbol of the 'flowers' (line 8) represents love, beauty, nature and abundance, now lost from the garden. The flowers provide a natural contrast with the chapel, which is man-made. This contrast suggests that the garden has been unnaturally altered, cutting off nature. Therefore, reclaiming the Garden of Love becomes necessary to restore the love previously associated with it.
Religion
Blake uses religious imagery throughout the poem. Readers may associate the Garden of Love with the archetypal garden, the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden forms part of Paradise, the place that Adam and Eve were expelled from after the 'Fall'. Thus, the original garden in the poem connects through biblical allusion to a state of innocence and goodness.
Only after religion is imposed on it (in the form of a chapel) does it become degraded, bleak and lifeless. Ironically, then, the degradation of the garden caused by the imposition of religion links organised religion or institutional Christianity to the Fall, sin or loss of goodness.
Blake clearly criticises organised religion, making it clear that it produces adverse effects on human liberty and love. This perspective may appear quite controversial because it presents religion as restrictive rather than enlightening.
The playful and joyfulness that Blake seems to favour becomes highlighted by the ambiguous nature of the garden in his childhood. The reader receives barely any additional details about how this garden used to be, even though the speaker references it as a point of comparison. This lack of detail suggests that the speaker expects readers to intuitively understand how this paradisiacal garden was.
Blake contrasts the restrictive nature of religion with childhood, a time typically characterised by freedom, joy and love. A sense of regression emerges; people are born with love as a natural impulse, but this becomes stifled by restrictions from religious institutions. For example, the commandments 'Thou shalt not' (line 6) physically restrict the speaker. His 'joys and desires' (line 12) are also physically restricted or painfully hemmed in by the briars (prickly or thorny stems) that the priests metaphorically wrap around them.
Apart from the speaker, the only other people appearing in the poem are the priests. Their presence seems to reinforce the joyless, serious world of adulthood. In particular, the black clothes they wear suggest the death of childhood, love and joy.
Similarly, the chapel remains closed off to people and the outside world, suggesting that organised religion locks people out of love, religious or other. This creates irony because the chapel supposedly should encourage love and loving acts. The poem may be interpreted as a call for freedom from religious strictures and a return to a childlike state of carefree expression involving love, joy and play.
Structure and form
Overall structure
The poem is structured in three quatrains (four-line stanzas), comprising 12 lines in total. It possesses a simple form which expresses a clear argument. The first stanza depicts the return to the past, whilst the second stanza focuses on the transformation that the garden has undergone. The last stanza, by contrast, appears ominous in tone. Blake's other poems are also written in clear and simple language, using the quadratic form which summons the ballad metre used in popular oral poetry.
Rhyme scheme
The rhyme scheme of the poem follows an ABCB pattern. The rhyme scheme of the first two stanzas is ABCB. In other words, only the second and fourth lines rhyme. Although no lines in the third stanza rhyme perfectly, internal rhymes appear in the last two lines.
'Gowns' nearly rhymes with 'rounds' (a half-rhyme), and 'briars' fully rhymes with 'desires'. The final rhyme connects aurally 'ire' and 'fire', both of which convey a sense of anger.
Metre and rhythm
The poem is written in quatrains which are rhymed in ABCB. However, the final two lines of the final stanza depart from this pattern and instead use internal rhyme on 'gowns' and 'rounds', and 'briars' and 'desires'. Instead of using tetrameter (four feet per line), Blake uses a more variable trimeter rhythm, which means that there are three main stresses per line.
Furthermore, the poem uses an anapestic trimeter pattern where each of the first three lines contains an iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed) and then a pair of anapests (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed). Every line in the final stanza starts with 'and'. This insertion of polysyndetons builds the poem's momentum to the conclusion.
The poem's meter is not entirely regular. Each line in the first quatrain has eight syllables, setting up the expectation of eight syllables per line for the remainder of the poem. However, our expectations are subverted.
The second quatrain's first three lines have nine syllables. The last line of the second quatrain and the first two lines of the third quatrain both have eight syllables, but again, the metre is disrupted the moment the priests enter, and so the final two lines have twelve syllables each. In short, the number of syllables per line is 8888, 9898, 88 12 12.
It is notable that the number of syllables change at the moments when religion is mentioned. Line 5, which introduces the newly built chapel, is engorged with nine syllables, while the final couplet describing the priests and their activity has 12 syllables per line. Through metre, Blake communicates how religion disrupts the natural order of things.
Just as the number of syllables change throughout the poem, stresses also change. The poem's dominant metrical foot is the anapest, which has a 'da da DUM' rhythm. For example, line 5 reads 'And the gates of this Chapel were shut'. Nevertheless, few lines are entirely anapestic. The first line, for example, is composed of an iamb and two anapests: 'I went to the Garden of Love', as are lines 3, 4, 8 and 10. The poem closes with amphibrachic tetrameter (four metrical feet, each of which have three syllables which follow the pattern of unstressed, stressed, unstressed): 'And bind ing | with bri ars | my joys and | de si res'.
The refusal of the poem to settle into a regular anapestic meter perhaps reflects the fact that it is a poem about conflict – a conflict between love and organized religion.
End-stopped lines
All lines are end-stopped, which means that each line stops at the end of the line. This technique reflects a subtle sense of resignation and acceptance, despite the speakers' disappointment at the state of things. It also adds to the simplicity of the poem, making its message clear to the reader.
Language and poetic techniques
Repetition
The use of repetition by poets helps to emphasise a point and make a speech easier to follow. Repetition also helps persuade readers of the point being made. Repeated words include 'Garden of Love', 'flowers', and 'Chapel'.
For Blake, flowers represent a simple symbol of joy and beauty, and their presence indicates abundance. The chapel, on the other hand, represents institutional Christianity and therefore their opposite: strictures, lifelessness and the strangling of the spirit.
Assonance
Assonance refers to when the sound between syllables of nearby words are similar, particularly emerging after they are rhymed or stressed.
Assonance in Action:
Assonance can be found in line 8 with 'so' and 'bore', which have similar vowels. Line 12 also uses assonance with the long 'i' sound of 'binding', 'briars' and 'desires'. This technique slows the pace, denoting the speaker's reluctance to accept the changes that have occurred.
Consonance
Consonants are words that sound similar that are positioned close to each other.
Consonance Example:
The consonance of the 't' sounds in 'gates', 'shut', 'shalt not' and 'writ' (lines 5-6) ties these words together, focused on binding and negativity. This perpetuates the view that organized religion is a significant force that locks people out of a relationship with God rather than welcoming them in.
Allusion
The title itself serves as an allusion to the Garden of Eden, which was a place that harboured true love and innocence – a place where humans flourished. There, Adam and Eve were able to love each other and make love without any shame.
The new state in which the speaker sees the garden reflects the Edenic garden after the Fall. The chapel in the middle of the garden implies that the church and religious restrictions are preventing humanity's return to this Edenic sense of Being.
Key quotes and analysis
I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen
The comparison is presented from the first stanza, portraying the difference between the past and present. This immediately creates the garden in its former state, comparing it to the present. The garden has 'flowers' only in the speaker's memory, suggesting that it is memory alone where love and joy exist (for the speaker).
A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green.
The chapel was newly built directly over the play area. The capitalisation of 'Garden of Love' shows its significance to the speaker. The capitalisation of 'Chapel' gives a sense of the institution of the Church occupying a greater physical space.
The capitalisation of both 'Chapel' and 'Priests' hints that the speaker is referring to the institution of the Church, as well as this particular chapel and group of priests.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not, writ over the door
The inverted, unnatural syntax of 'Saw what I never had seen' suggests the changes themselves are unnatural. The commandment 'Thou shalt not' written over the door creates an intimidating, unwelcoming atmosphere.
There is no specific command after this negative imperative 'Thou shalt not', suggesting the Church forbids everything or forbids arbitrarily.
And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be
The language is quite simple, allowing the speaker's emotion to come through. There is a contrast between freedom and restriction, as the sense of play recalls childhood but the presence of the chapel overwrites this. There is an allusion to the Garden of Eden, which the first humans joyfully existed in. Here, the speaker is not equating the fall of man with sin, but with organised religion itself.
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
Chapels and priests are associated with Christianity, though Blake's text could be a criticism of any organised religion. The priests are wearing black, not white, which connotes darkness and makes the imagery more ominous. The idea of them 'walking their rounds' suggests that they are almost patrolling the area. This portrays them as gatekeepers of the love that the place may offer.
The final image of the church's restrictive power features internal rhyme and a tetrameter rhythm that becomes longer and more pentameter-like, leading to a sense of collapse or deflation. The priests are further doling out commands by restricting the poet's joys and desires.
Comparisons with other anthology poems
Comparison with 'At An Inn'
Both poems use allusions to the past and refer to a place where love was harboured more strongly. They both employ the first person to highlight the transformation of their love.
Similarities:
- 'I used to play on the green' (The Garden of Love)
- 'Veiled smiles bespoke their thought / Of what we were' (At An Inn)
- 'I saw it was filled with graves' (The Garden of Love)
- 'Love lingered numb' (At An Inn)
- 'And binding with briars, my joys & desires' (The Garden of Love)
- 'once let us stand / As we stood then!' (At An Inn)
Comparison with 'Remember'
Similarities:
- A sense of loss permeates both poems, which is highlighted through the sentimental and nostalgic tone and language
- Both speakers refer to religious imagery to express their feelings. The evocation of such imagery aids in affirming both of the authors' personal convictions.
Differences:
- In The Garden of Love, the speaker is not appealing to a particular love interest but speaking to a childhood memory and love for a childhood place. In 'Remember', on the other hand, the poem is an address to a lover.
- The Garden of Love has a direct, simple message about organised religion being constrictive and limiting love for individuals. In contrast, the speaker in 'Remember' wants her lover to remember her, but mid-way through the poem accepts or acknowledges that they may not. Thus, The Garden of Love's message remains constant, whilst Remember's speaker changes her mind.
Comparison with 'Walking Away'
Similarities:
- Both poems centre on reflection and childhood, and harbour a sense of nostalgia for the past
Differences:
- 'Walking Away' centres on a father and son familial relationship, whereas The Garden of Love reminisces about the loss of love for their childhood playground.
- 'Walking Away' has a more bittersweet tone as the speaker alludes to the growth of the child distancing themselves from their parents. The Garden of Love's tone and message can be interpreted as bitter.
Remember!
Key Points to Remember:
- Blake criticises organised religion for restricting natural human love, joy and freedom
- The Garden of Eden allusion emphasises how institutional religion has corrupted an original state of innocence
- The transformation from flowers to graves symbolises the death of love and joy under religious control
- The poem's irregular metre and disrupted rhythm reflect the conflict between natural love and religious restriction
- Blake was deeply spiritual but opposed to institutional Christianity, which heavily influences the poem's message