by Dawn H. Swinnie

Created on: November 27, 2011   Last Updated: November 28, 2011

"The Garden of Love" by William Blake, is a poem of remembrance. He compares this garden that he played in as a kid to what it is now which is very different. He begins by letting the audience know how dear that garden was to him. It brought him happiness and took all of his cares and worries away. It was his fortress, somewhere he could run to when necessary.

Now he's all grown up and departs from the garden for a while to tend to his life and fulfill his responsibilities. He decides to come back to the garden and it has drastically changed. This change is not good for him because all of his memories are gone and his happiness has floated away along with it. His entire childhood has been erased because the garden is no longer there. Home is no longer home. Happiness is no longer what it used to be. Everything is gone right before his eyes.

He opens the poem with the lines:

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

This chapel is all there is to his fun childhood. A church has taken it's place. He expected that same fresh green grass to be there and he sees a chapel right in the middle. It holds no value to him so he doesn't care why it's there or how it even got there. He just wants to know why it's there and where the garden that he played in when he was just a boy has gone.

He goes on to talk about the beautiful flowers that were in this garden but they have been replaced by graves. Hard cold stone has taken the place of his laughter and destroyed the beauty that this garden was filled with. The pain has to be apparent with Blake as he writes about this absent garden. The cheer, the joy, the playfulness of a garden is now gloomy, dreadful and grey. Graves have taken its place. What once was alive is now dead.

He sees priests walking around perhaps preparing for funerals. He can't wrap his head around what has happened. Everything that he ever dreamed of as a child was in that garden and is now being whisked away like a theif in the night. "And binding with briar, my joys and desires" This was such a heavy line because briar has prickly leaves and is known to cause pain and in this poem, Blake used briar as a double meaning which is a prickly bush and also signifying pain. So this pain was binding his joy and desires, leaving him empty.

This is a wonderful poem and the emotion just jumps off the page. William has proved his point and his audience is right htere with him as if we too, are being stripped of the garden.

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