The Garden of Love
Summary
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.
Analysis
"The
Garden of Love" is a deceptively simple three-stanza poem made up of
quatrains. It emphasizes the death and decay that have overtaken a place that
once used to hold such life and beauty for the speaker.
Following
the specific examples of flowers representing types of love, this poem paints a
broader picture of flowers in a garden as the joys and desires of youth. 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 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 not-so-subtle
critique shows Blake’s frustration at a religious system that would deny men
the pleasures of nature and their own instinctive desires. He sees religion as
an arm of modern society in general, with its demand that human beings reject
their created selves to conform to a more mechanistic and materialistic world.
No comments:
Post a Comment