The Garden of Love Exhibit

The Garden of Love

By William Blake

From Songs of Experience

Illustration

Transcript

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.

Description

    The Garden of Love, a poem from William Blake’s Songs of Experience, describes the sadness someone experiences over ruined memories. In it the narrator tells the reader they went to the Garden of Love, a place from their childhood where they used to play (the specific phrase, “Where I used to play on the green,” could suggest it is a continuation of a poem from the Songs of Innocence, The Ecchoing Green, but it could also just be a phrase from the time). There is now a chapel built nearby, and what was once a lovely garden now was a graveyard choked in briar which priests tended to. The poem consists of three stanzas which are separated by briars, above it three priests dressed in black pray over what can be assumed to be a grave. The colors are all natural and quite dark, the most contrast in the entire piece being the red in the priests faces and hands. Below the poem are more briars which are caught around the flowers that once grew in the garden.

Analysis

    As with many of the poems within Songs of Experience, its themes are directly present. The innocence of nature and of childhood has now given way to the experience of life, full of sadness and grief wrought by the rest of society. The once lovely garden has now been taken over by graves and briars, both a metaphor and direct consequence of the way society treats itself. It gives itself rules and expectations it never had originally because they came to the conclusion it was right. Humanity decided for itself that it is in human nature to be uniform, and where there is naturally grief must a similar feeling be spread to that which doesn’t have it. In this specific case it is the rules imposed by religion which now decide where joy may be, where it is appropriate, and they bind the rest, literally or figuratively, physically or metaphorically. While in unrestrained nature there exists grief and strife, joy and innocence are not shackled to young life and young life alone. It is only in society these distinctions are made.