The Garden of Love
The Garden of Love - context Summary
Songs of Experience, 1794
From Blake s Songs of Experience (1794), this short poem protests organized religion s restraining of natural desire and human joy. The speaker returns to a childhood play-place to find a chapel built, closed gates bearing "Thou shalt not," graves where flowers should bloom, and priests binding pleasures with briars. It expresses Blake s broader spiritual and philosophical rejection of institutional constraint on innocence and love.
Read Complete AnalysesI laid me down upon a bank, Where Love lay sleeping; I heard among the rushes dank Weeping, weeping. Then I went to the heath and the wild, To the thistles and thorns of the waste; And they told me how they were beguiled, Driven out, and compelled to the chaste. 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 turned to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tombstones where flowers should be; And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.
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