Desert Island Poems: The Garden of Love by William Blake

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The Garden of Love

By William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

Do we live in a ‘post-institutional’ world? That is to say, a world in which we no longer trust institutions. Banks, the church, schools, universities, the NHS, the government, the courts themselves – we could say that in modern times, all of these institutions have let us down badly and lost our trust. But if we can’t trust these institutions then where does that leave us?

Enter William Blake.

It would appear these questions we are asking ourselves today are not new and that William Blake, poetic visionary and general stubborn mule that he was, also had a bone to pick with the hierarchies of his day, and this poem The Garden of Love is a prime example of the bitterness and anger he harboured for the church and the wider powers-that-be; he seemed to fear that institutions such as the church were tightening their grip on ordinary people’s lives at the end of the 18th century.

Of all the aspects of Blake's poetry that I love – and I really do love it and so many of its aspects – is his ability to fully embrace rhyme and repetition, and that's not to mention the almost anthemic quality to the rhythm of his writing. I've written before about his poem The Tyger but this is another poem of his, also from his 1794 collection Songs of Experience. I wonder if, in contemporary times, we’ve turned out back on form and meter in poetry, and if that’s the case that’s very much our loss. This poem, along with The Tyger, and so many other poems of his, is a masterclass in using a simple form and using it to make a very complex poem, resonating with his vision and ideas and music. The word visionary is a word that is associated with Blake a lot, but he was a very daring person considering his time and the stances he took against the orthodoxy of the day particularly in regard to the powers of the church and the dehumanising effects of rapid industrialisation. So, I love the fact that he had a vision and that he was loyal to his vision and passionate about it. How many poets we read today have a clear-sighted vision about what they are trying to do as writers? It’s a question I ask myself about my own writing: where are you going with all this? I’ll ask. What I do take from this poem of Blake’s is that he was someone who valued freedom: freedom of the human spirit and the imagination. It appears to me that what he takes most umbrage at (umbrage being a light word to use in his case) is the power of institutions in restricting both our spirit and imagination.

The first quatrain sees a huge chapel built on the place where the speaker ‘used to play on the green’. His use of ‘green’ here is significant as it rings of references to innocence and fertility and promise. Yet the ‘Chapel was built in the midst’ with midst suggesting it was in the way, slap-bang in the middle, and that it has come to dominate his childhood space. This location, then, in itself becomes a symbol of his childhood. The church has physically and metaphorically displaced his childhood and the childhood of everyone else; innocence and joy has been displaced with the stricture of the Chapel’s structure. Also, to see what one ‘never had seen’ implies a sense of epiphany with age and how he’s come to see the real harmful effect organised religion can have.

His use of parataxis, the repetition of ‘And’, which kickstarts the second quatrain is interesting as it’s very much a Biblical technique used most evidently in the Book of Genesis. So, the fact that he’s using this Biblical technique in an anti-religious poem gives the poem a satirical edge. Blake is using the techniques of the Bible to criticise the modern day church; he is using the church’s language against itself.

‘Thou Shalt Not’ being ‘writ over the door’ alludes to the limiting and oppressive dictats of the church of the time and how he characterises it as a church which is more concerned with telling people what they cannot do, than how to live joyful, good lives. The fact that it’s written over the door, the threshold is noteworthy suggesting that it defines the ethos, that one’s relationship with God is one of abstaining from things, and resisting one thing or another, as opposed to worship or song or love. He is criticising the fact that church is akin to a jail in how it seeks to correct, limit, restrain human passions and instincts.

In the last quatrain, the Garden of Love is filled with graves and tomb-stones, with ‘priests in black-gowns doing their rounds’, which not only makes them seem like grim reapers, but the phrase ‘doing their rounds’ almost makes them seem like doctors, going from house to house administering God and Christianity as opposed to letting people come to God by themselves, freely. It’s a sinister image, emphasised by it’s not just one priest but ‘priests’ – symbolic of the institution of the church.

The last line is an excellent line of poetry, with the alliteration of ‘binding’ and ‘briars’ and the internal rhyme of ‘briars’ and ‘desires’. The fact they are ‘binding’ is an interesting choice as Blake, someone who wrote, illustrated and printed his own books, would no doubt have been aware of the reference to book binding that’s implied in the word and perhaps alluding to a sense of censorship that came with the church at that time. They were ‘binding with briars’ that books that he was ‘binding’, they were enclosing, limiting, restricting the ideas of Blake’s time, books which contained and were in themselves his joys and desires.

It’s a powerful 12-line poem which takes on not just the establishment of the church but questions and attacks the oppressive nature of institutions like the church, but primarily the church, of his day. And it does so with characteristic sweeping, yet simply rhythms balanced with a subtle but emphatic use of rhyme. It’s one of the great poems and a masterclass of the 12-line poem.