The Garden Of Love

Julia McDonald

ENGL 102H/Ellzey

Poetry Interpretation

“The Garden of Love”

“The Garden of Love” is, quite obviously, a poem about life and the pursuit of happiness. It is also about the effects that negativity can have on love. Blake uses religion to convey the idea that negativity “…pervades and corrupts all life”(51 n.9), further supporting it with his use of rhyme scheme and imagery. In searching for love people often times emerge scarred and hostile from their fruitless efforts. Some continue to have faith in the idea of love and its possibilities, others do not. These folk sometimes seek refuge from their pain in a variety of houses. It is just as often that these refugees project their negative attitudes onto others that search for love and happiness. People who fear love can prevent others from finding it, because they change the positive surroundings to suit their negative world.

The conflict between organized religion and the individual is the constant idea throughout the poem. Blake, himself, despised the Church, as an institution rather than an idea, and used religious symbols to show how structured religion can destroy the lover and creator within. A chapel has been built, perverting a once pure and loving environment. In inspecting the chapel, the persona feels only negativity from a religious house, as the gates are shut “And Thou shalt not writ over the door”(6). Not only has man and machine invaded this place once full of life, but they have also brought with them negative comm...

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...laws and motions that love does not. In “The Garden of Love,” the church expects the natural act and emotion of love to follow these motions, which is entirely unnatural, just as it is unnatural to be celibate and deny emotion for another human being. “The result is no less cruel-the banishment of daylight love for nighttime deceit, the repression and perversion of the young into the gray and palsied sufferings of the old”(Hagstrum 531). The negative and confining nature of the Church and celibacy prevent the young, positive nature of love from existing and exploring.

“The Garden of Love” is a true testament to how easily negative energy and negative surroundings can wound and infect a positive environment. Negativity spreads like a disease, disrupting the easy and natural optimistic heart. Blake conveys this point with the convenient use of a confining institution such as the Church, which he further supports with a fine use of imagery and an effective incomplete rhyme scheme and voice. He quite easily showed that the negativity others accept through their life experiences end up robbing others of their innocence, as they choose not to process their emotions, but dwell in them.