The garden of love

I went to the Garden of Love

Capital letters = this is no ordinary garden!
The Garden holds great significance. As well as a sexual or romantic type of love, it could also be ‘Love’ (capital L), a first, primal love like that given to men from God.
The ‘Garden’, then, could be a place within ourselves where we store this primal emotion – our own, internal, Garden of Eden.
This is not a physical, but a spiritual, place. Our place of ‘innocence’.
AO3: Remember that Blake, though hostile to the Church, was a Christian.

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Link this vision to Blake’s idea of ‘innocence’. Here, he enters the world of ‘experience’ for the first time and is shocked at how his previous freedoms have literally been blocked by the church.
Chapel shows organised religion where he used to play and he is shocked
The garden has changed since las time he saw it.
1. The colour green is associated with growth, fertility and spring
2. Village greens were places of freedom and play, representing the importance of the imagination in human life
3. Village greens were not owned by anyone, so represented freedom from the rules or demands of an authority figure
4. Blake wrote an opposite poem in ‘Innocence’ called ‘The Echoing Green’
Capital ‘C’ means this stands for the institution of the Church, rather than an individual place
Past tense – he is no longer a child who plays

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Negative and unwelcoming, barring access to God and replacing former freedom. Structure: This line adds an extra syllable to the iambic tetrameter of the rest of the poem, stressing the corruption of the simplicity of the Garden by the Chapel.
There is an extra syllable in this part which corrupts the peacefulness
He still looks for something left from his youth.
‘Sweet’, here could refer to the joyful sexuality or innocence of the symbolic Garden, now lost.
Flowers show signs of purity and delecateness and new begginings but alos of sexuality. However in their place there is something there insetad. So when he truns to his garden of love filled with memories of his youth and something is now in his place.

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This final stanza uses gothic imagery to replace the pastoral…
Contrast this vision of death with the ‘sweet flowers’ in the previous stanza. What is the effect of this?
Colour/growth/life is replaced with grey/death.
Dark, bleak and unimaginative
A mechanical ritual or routine; they methodically ‘bind’ desire and joy
It is almsot like the tomb stone are trespassing where the flowers should be
The capital P shows the power of the church
Link to jesus with his crown of throns with 'bires'
The rhyming at the end enphisies the machanic ways of the poem and almsot show it circling in his head hurting like the thorn crown hurt jesus
Blake is suggesting that he suffers, as Christ suffered – but his suffering serves no higher purpose. Those subject to the tyranny of the Church are controlled externally (as by the priests who patrol) but also internally through having been made to accept its teachings and modes of thought.
Cf. ‘mind forged manacles’ (London) and ‘dark satanic mills’ (Jerusalem).

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This final stanza uses gothic imagery to replace the pastoral…
Contrast this vision of death with the ‘sweet flowers’ in the previous stanza. What is the effect of this?
Colour/growth/life is replaced with grey/death.
Dark, bleak and unimaginative
A mechanical ritual or routine; they methodically ‘bind’ desire and joy
It is almsot like the tomb stone are trespassing where the flowers should be
The capital P shows the power of the church
Link to jesus with his crown of throns with 'bires'
The rhyming at the end enphisies the machanic ways of the poem and almsot show it circling in his head hurting like the thorn crown hurt jesus
Blake is suggesting that he suffers, as Christ suffered – but his suffering serves no higher purpose. Those subject to the tyranny of the Church are controlled externally (as by the priests who patrol) but also internally through having been made to accept its teachings and modes of thought.
Cf. ‘mind forged manacles’ (London) and ‘dark satanic mills’ (Jerusalem).

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