The Garden of Love

A quick analysis of “The Garden of Love” reveals the following: “The green” (Line 4) refers to the idea of the village green, the grassy area in the middle of a village where social events like festivals took place, which was a common area for free public use. Children would have played safely and innocently in such a spot. In addition, traditionally, churches and chapels in England have gardens around them, which may be tended or left to grow wild. These church gardens also contain the burial grounds for the local population, but there are often still empty areas.

The three words “Thou shalt not” (Line 6) in the second stanza are the beginning of several of the Ten Commandments found in the Christian Old Testament, such as “Thou shalt not kill.” They are moral imperatives, meaning, “You must not.” The speaker turns away from the door, toward the garden, but finds that it no longer contains the “sweet flowers” that it previously “bore” or contained (Line 8).

In the final stanza, the speaker watches helplessly as the priests bind[…] with briars, my joys & desires” (Line 12), meaning that they are tying up or restricting the speaker’s natural urges and happiness with sharp, thorny branches of briar, a weed that grows in the English countryside.

In addition to the quick analysis, “The Garden of Love” contains other layers of meaning. The poem contains, for instance, a message that was one of Blake’s most heartfelt beliefs: that organized religion, represented by the church, its rituals and prohibitions and the people elected to administer these, seeks to suppress and deny the natural, instinctive, and innocent joys of human experience. The “Garden of Love,” a place of childhood play, pleasure, and freedom, transforms into a garden of organized religion where death, darkness, and oppression prevail. The garden of the speaker’s past: green, fertile, and full of play, represents childhood and its unfettered, innocent state. The present garden is now a graveyard, symbolizing the death of innocence, of “joys and desires.”

This place of tombstones may be adulthood rather than death itself. As one of the “Songs of Experience,” the poem collection that followed the “Songs of Innocence,” the poem expresses the loss of infant joy through the process of maturity and the gaining of awareness of life’s trials and tribulations. However, this inevitable growing up, if accompanied by membership of a church like the Church of England, loses any vestige of pleasure and the potential for self-expression. Not only is the death of the body at the end of life inevitable, but so too is the death of the human spirit while still alive, if the authority of religion reigns.

The first stanza introduces the “Garden of Love,” which, with its capitalization, indicates the importance of the place for the speaker. Likewise, the “Chapel” (Line 3) is capitalized. The short, end-stopped lines, forming simple abcb rhyming quatrains, and the use of monosyllabic words (“And saw what I never had seen” [Line 2]), lend a childlike nature to the tone of the beginning poem. Many of Blake’s poems refer to children as symbols of purity and childhood as a time of unrestricted joy, a theme common to the Romantic movement. Blake’s poems such as “The Lamb” depict children as close to God and as representations of pure love. Thus, the speaker recalls the “Garden of Love” as their place of unrestricted play and, at the same time, the word “green” implies nature, fecundity, purity, and all that a garden represents.

The nature’s green contrasts sharply with the “Chapel” (Line 3), which appears abruptly in front of the speaker, “in its midst” (Line 3). The line “I saw what I never had seen” (Line 2) is somewhat ambiguous. Perhaps the chapel did not exist in the speaker’s childhood. Alternatively, the chapel may have existed while the innocent children played around it, unaware of its influence and repression, which would only come to light in adulthood. D. G. Gilham adds an extension to this interpretation in his book Blake’s Contrary States: ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience’ as Dramatic Poems, in which he suggests that the blame for such loss of innocence does not necessarily lie with organized religion but with the speaker themselves, who may have undergone religious conversion and therefore chosen the prohibitions associated with religion (Gillham, D. G. Blake’s Contrary States: ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience as Dramatic Poems’ . Cambridge University Press, 2010).

The second stanza follows the same form and meter as the first, as the childlike speaker observes the closed gates and door of the chapel. These contrast with the open nature of the green, both the village green of childhood play and the green representing the wildness and freedom of nature. The words “Thou shalt not” (Line 6) written over the door represent the negative commandments of the Old Testament. This unfinished commandment, lacking in a verb, delivers the stark and simple message that everything is prohibited. The purpose of the church is simply to ban all forms of natural human behavior, whether it be considered criminal or not. Many critics have discussed to what extent Blake is addressing sexuality in this poem. The innocence lost in the poem may also extend to the expression of sexual joy, which is suppressed and replaced by shame and guilt under the church’s laws. Finding the chapel closed, the speaker turns back to the garden, only to find the “sweet flowers [it] bore” (Line 8) have gone. These flowers are again a reminder of the beauty of nature and of innocent children left to grow unrestrained. The church has killed them all.

In the third stanza, the poet describes the garden, with its graves and tomb-stones, as an image of death. Each line begins with “And,” as the speaker adds more details to the picture of doom and gloom. The flowers are mentioned again, as the rightful inhabitants of the now-barren garden. The only sign of life involves the “Priests in black gowns” (Line 11), and again capitalization adds weight to the image, highlighting their positions of authority within the Church. The meter in the last two lines of the poem changes and the lines are longer, with internal rhymes rather than that of the previous stanzas. “And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds” (Line 11) has a rhythm that accompanies the image of these black-robed figures walking a pre-ordained route, circling and protecting the chapel, allowing for no diversion from the path. Thus, the church delineates and directs its followers along a narrow, restrictive trajectory, stifling creativity, self-expression, and pleasure. The last line emphasizes this as the purpose of organized religion: “And binding with briars, my joys & desires” (Line 12). The thorns of the briar branches are wrapped tightly around the body of sinners, punishing them with physical and psychological pain for their un-Christian thoughts and drives.