1. The Garden of Love
William Blake

2. I went to the Garden of Love,
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,
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,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

3. William Blake:
Born in Westminster, apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire at the age of 14
Owned his own print shop and was an engraver, printer and writer.
Seen as a “revolutionary”, eccentric with ideas that were not generally accepted at the time.
Much maligned in life, but highly regarded after his death.

4. Religious Views: Started having religious visions at 4 years old
Against Organized Religion
Held that people should look for God within themselves
Did not believe the Church should restrict love and sexuality
Taught his wife how to have visions

5. Summary:
The twelve lines of the William Blake’s poem The Garden of Love belong to the state of Experience that characterizes the present day world.
Experience stands in total contrast to the state of Innocence.
The speaker visits a garden that he had frequented in his youth, only to find it overrun with briars, symbols of death in the form of tombstones, and close-minded clergy.

6. Overview:
"The Garden of Love" is a deceptively simple three-stanza poem made up of quatrains.
The first two quatrains follow an ABCB rhyme scheme, with the final stanza breaking the rhyme to ABCD.
The lack of rhyme in the last stanza serves to emphasize the death and decay that have overtaken a place that once used to hold such life and beauty for the speaker.
The poem paints a broader picture of flowers in a garden which could represent the joys and desires of youth.

7. Overview:
When the speaker returns to the Garden of Love, he finds a chapel built there with the words, “Thou shalt not,” written overhead.
The implication of these words is that organized religion is intentionally forbidding people from enjoying their natural desires and pleasures.
The speaker also finds the garden given over to the graves of his pleasures while a black-clad priest binds his “joys and desires” in thorns.
This is critique that shows Blake’s frustration at religious systems that would deny men the pleasures of nature and their own instinctive desires.

8. Overview:
He sees religion as an arm of modern society in general, with its demands that mankind should reject their “created selves” to conform to a more mechanistic and materialistic world that was a result of the Industrial Age which was just beginning.
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.
He felt that sexuality and instinct is holy, the world of institutionalised religion negates this instinct and leads to an imprisonment of the mind and can result in hypocrisy.
Those rules, which forbid the celebration of the body, kill “life” itself.

9. Overview:
In this poem, 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 that were prevalent at the time.
Blake believed in “inner light” and “the kingdom within”.
Moral laws without any rationale are not to be obeyed, and he infers that the Church and its negative rule destroy innocent affections.
The “Church of Experience” like the King and State rely on such powers to ensure obedience.

10. Overview:
Some critics have linked the poem is that of the Marriage Act of 1753.
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 centres.
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.

11. Stanza One: I went to the Garden of Love,
A place of happiness, love and fond memories. Why would he go? What was he expecting?
Symbol of organised/ institutionalised religion. A personal relationship between God and man being given rules and structure.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
Tone? Emotions implied?
Intrusion by man/ society into the rural free world of childhood and innocence

12. Stanza Two: And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
Connotations?
Sense of exclusion, rules and forbidden being emphasised
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. Writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
Hoping that the place of his fond memories has not been made subject to the changes that the gate and the chapel signify
Symbolic of innocent love that is not impacted on by society and the rules that are attached by society to this emotion that have infused it with a cynicism that is not in keeping with “true love”.

13. Stanza Three: And I saw it was filled with graves,
Figurative and literal. Explore all the aspects that come from both.
The repetition of the “and” to create a feeling of finality and a building up of the tone of doom and the feeling that no one escapes.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desres.
Symbols of the institution. Symbols of the death of innocence?
Look at what is being bound, and what is binding it. This is reinforced by the alliteration.
Set routine, inflexible and bureaucratic taking no thought for the individual but focused on the

14. Questions:
What is Blake “saying” about the society in which he lives? (3)
Discuss the symbolism in the first stanza. (4)
What are the connotations of “Thou shalt not” in stanza two? (2)
Identify the tone in the second stanza, give a quote to substantiate your answer?
Why were the “gates shut”? (2)
What do the graves, priests “walking their rounds” reflect in the mind of the poet? (3)
In your opinion is Blake successful in conveying his message? Give quotes and reasons for your answer? (4)