The Garden of Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1794

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Childhood and Adulthood

“The Garden of Love” comes from the Experience section of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The poems in Experience depict the restrictions the adult world imposes on children, whose innate urges are toward freedom, wonder, happiness, and love. Blake’s belief was that humans are born naturally loving God and provided with all that they need to be happy. His poetry shows how the unnatural restraints and dictums of the adult world quash those joys.

“The Garden of Love” is divided into two distinct periods of life, corresponding to childhood and adulthood. The role of the garden for the child is depicted in Lines 4, 8, and 10. These lines look back at how the garden was for the speaker as a child and the use of the word “play” (Line 4) confirms this. The child was free and happy in the garden. The “sweet flowers” (Line 8) of the garden in childhood reinforce the image of a place of beauty, and of nature in its free and abundant state.

In sharp contrast to the idyllic image of the garden in childhood, the adult perspective is of a dark, barren, restrictive place. This image is a metaphor for the stifling rules and restrictions that are used to oppress children as they become adults. The negative commandments that begin with “Thou Shalt Not” epitomize this oppression. The implication here is that not only does organized religion deny and repress humanity’s instinctive thrust towards pleasure and self-expression, but that adults inflict the same suffering on children.

The priests, who are the only people in the poem other than the speaker, are a further representation of the miserable and restrictive world of adulthood. Their black clothing and the graves and tombstones of the garden symbolize the death of childhood innocence and freedom. Their determination to bind “joys and desires” (Line 12) shows the oppression of the adult world. Their “walking their rounds” (Line 11) indicates the following of a prescribed route, not unlike the narrow paths and restrictive boxes into which adult-run institutions like schools, factories, and churches force the growing human to fit.

Love

The title of the poem reveals the importance of love in the speaker’s and the poet’s world. The types of love represented or implied in the poem are several. One is the innocent love of childhood, where children play harmoniously, in a garden of flowers, on the green in the middle of a village. This offers an image of brotherly or community love. Coherent with this is the reciprocal love of God, for the children and from the children. Though they may not be aware of the presence of God in their lives, due to their lack of exposure to organized religion, their existence in an idyllic natural scene, each one of God’s creations, is an expression of God. Despite Blake’s criticism of the church, he was a spiritual man and believed in the divine. The poem symbolizes the killing of this natural love for God by the negativity and disillusionment forced upon churchgoers, to be replaced by mindless obedience and shame.

A further type of love implied in the poem is sexual. The “joys & desires” (Line 12) repressed and destroyed by the priests and the chapel hint at those of human beings in their natural, unconditioned state freely enjoying physical and erotic pleasure.

Humanity’s Fall

The poem “The Garden of Love” thematically refers to humankind’s fall from grace—from innocence to sin—as occurred in the Biblical Garden of Eden. The idea of original sin was anathema to Blake; yet, while he was openly critical of the oppression of natural human instinct and joy by organized religion, he was also aware that humans can also be responsible for their own feelings of being trapped or enslaved, and that it can be a choice some make to allow others, or institutions, to commandeer our thoughts. The garden and the chapel in the poem can therefore also be interpreted as physical embodiments of real places, as constructs of the mind, which believers allow to shape and restrict their thinking; D. G. Gillham further explores this very point (Gillham, D. G. Blake’s Contrary States: ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience as Dramatic Poems’. Cambridge University Press, 2010). In this interpretation, the fall that humans experience as they lose their innocence is not necessarily one that is imposed upon them by societal restraints but rather the logical outcome of a conscious or unconscious choice to let religious doctrine control their attitudes and beliefs.