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Gr. 12 Eng HL POETRY – THE GARDEN OF LOVE by William Blake

Analysis of a poem: POETRY – THE GARDEN OF LOVE by William Blake

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The Garden of Love Summary & Analysis by William Blake

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"The Garden of Love" is a poem by English Romantic visionary William Blake. Blake was devoutly religious, but he had some major disagreements with the organized religion of his day. The poem expresses this, arguing that religion should be about love, freedom, and joy—not rules and restrictions. The poem is part of his famous collection Songs of Innocence and Experience , which was first published in 1789.

• Read the full text of “The Garden of Love”

The Full Text of “The Garden of Love”

1 I went to the Garden of Love, 

2 And saw what I never had seen: 

3 A Chapel was built in the midst, 

4 Where I used to play on the green. 

5 And the gates of this Chapel were shut, 

6 And Thou shalt not. writ over the door; 

7 So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, 

8 That so many sweet flowers bore. 

9 And I saw it was filled with graves, 

10 And tomb-stones where flowers should be: 

11 And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, 

12 And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

“The Garden of Love” Summary

“the garden of love” themes.

Love vs. Organized Religion

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

Childhood vs. Adulthood

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “the garden of love”.

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: 

Lines 11-12

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,  And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

“The Garden of Love” Symbols

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

Graves and Tombstones

“the garden of love” poetic devices & figurative language.

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Alliteration

Polysyndeton, end-stopped line, “the garden of love” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Thou shalt not
• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Garden of Love”

Rhyme scheme, “the garden of love” speaker, “the garden of love” setting, literary and historical context of “the garden of love”, more “the garden of love” resources, external resources.

Illustration and Other Poems — A resource from the Tate organization, which holds a large collection of Blake originals. Here the poem can be seen in its original illustrated form.

Blake's Radicalism — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's radicalism.

Blake's Visions — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's religious visions.

Full Text of Songs of Innocence and Experience — Various formats for the full text in which "The Garden of Love" is collected.

A Reading by Allen Ginsberg — Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reads the poem.

LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake

Ah! Sun-flower

A Poison Tree

Earth's Answer

Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)

Holy Thursday (Songs of Innocence)

Infant Sorrow

Introduction (Songs of Innocence)

Nurse's Song (Songs of Experience)

Nurse's Song (Songs of Innocence)

The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Experience)

The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence)

The Clod and the Pebble

The Divine Image

The Ecchoing Green

The Human Abstract

The Little Black Boy

The Little Vagabond

The School Boy

The Sick Rose

To the Evening Star

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A Summary and Analysis of William Blake’s ‘The Garden of Love’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Many of William Blake’s greatest poems are written in clear and simple language, using the quatrain form which faintly summons the ballad metre used in popular oral poetry. But some of his poetry, being allegorical and symbolic in nature, requires some careful close reading and textual analysis. ‘The Garden of Love’ is one such example. What is this poem about?

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.

In summary, Blake’s speaker goes into the Garden of Love and finds a chapel built on the spot where he used to play as a child. The gates of the chapel are shut, and commandments and prohibitions are written over the door. The garden has become a graveyard, its flowers replaced by tombstones. This idea of love starting out as a land of liberty and promise but ending up a world of death and restriction is expressed very powerfully through the image of the garden.

Gardens in poetry often tempt us to recall the first biblical garden, the Garden of Eden, and the paradise which Adam and Eve lost when they succumbed to temptation and tasted the forbidden fruit.

And ‘The Garden of Love’ is a poem that reflects William Blake’s detestation of organised religion. Blake was a deeply spiritual artist and poet, but he disliked the institutions associated with religion, and this can be seen clearly in this poem, where the garden of love, formerly associated with play and carefree childhood, is now the site of a ‘Chapel’: a physical embodiment of the Church.

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.

This is no welcoming chapel, for the gates are shut (perhaps inspiring Christina Rossetti to write her great poem on a similar theme, ‘Shut Out’ ), and the chapel is marked by commandments forbidding certain things (‘Thou shalt not’ recalling the famous Ten Commandments from the Old Testament).

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.

But even the garden which surrounds this chapel has changed, and has become a graveyard: death has replaced life, as tomb-stones have supplanted flowers in the ground.

Then, a final image of the Church’s restrictive power: in the final couplet, where for the first time we get internal rhyme (gowns/rounds, briars/desires) and the tetrameter which had held sway until now gives way to the longer pentameter (leading to a sense of collapse or deflation, rather than welcome expansiveness), the priests are further doling out commandments, by restricting the poet’s ‘joys and desires’.

The message of ‘The Garden of Love’ appears to be fairly clear, therefore: organised religion is anathema to love, and is about imposing control and restrictions on us, killing our happiness and curbing our natural desires and wishes. The institutions of religion, unlike the joyousness of religious belief itself, turn the world from a garden (symbolising growth and life) into a grave (symbolising death and decay).

Blake was by no means the first writer to criticise organised religion and argue that it fell short of the ideals it purported to espouse – we find many Enlightenment philosophers and thinkers, such as Thomas Paine in his brilliant  The Age of Reason , propounding such a viewpoint – but to put it in such vividly symbolic and clear terms is a testament to Blake’s gift as a poet.

But is the poem’s meaning as straightforward as this analysis suggests? Perhaps not. In his excellent study of Blake’s poetry, Blake’s Contrary States: The ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ as Dramatic Poems , D. G. Gillham observes that the fault may lie as much within the speaker himself as it does in organised religion.

Gillham suggests that a religious conversion (robbing the speaker of his enjoyment of nature, which has become tainted when viewed from a religious perspective) or sexual disenchantment may be at the root of the speaker’s attack on religion in this poem.

‘In short, the speaker is a fool or a hypocrite,’ Gillham adds, noting that whilst the speaker’s criticism of the Church may hold some truth, his ‘distorted’ view of the Garden of Love puts the blame back on himself as much as on outside forces.

‘The Garden of Love’ and ‘A Poison Tree’

Indeed, in the same book Gillham makes a similar argument about a number of other Blake poems, such as ‘A Poison Tree’: in that poem, the speaker grows a poisoned apple with which to tempt his foe, and is victorious when his enemy steals into his garden to eat the deadly fruit.

But the speaker, Blake suggests, has also been ‘poisoned’ or corrupted by the act of deceiving his foe, because he resorted to dishonest and underhand tactics to vanquish him. In this respect, we might view the two poems as offering a productive dialogue about the nature of self versus other. Of course, in both poems, Blake uses the (richly symbolic) landscape of the garden to present his idea. We have analysed ‘A Poison Tree’ here .

So, perhaps the speaker of ‘The Garden of Love’ is not exactly beyond reproach himself. What evidence is there in the poem for such an interpretation? The idea that the speaker has undergone some late religious conversion is supported by the poem’s opening stanza:

‘I went to the Garden of Love, / And saw what I never had seen’: in other words, he had never noticed the Chapel there before. The wording of the third line (‘A Chapel was built in the midst ’) allows for the possibility that the Chapel has always been there, and it is merely the speaker’s blinkered vision that prevented him from noticing it. This suggests a religious conversion.

What this also implies is that the ‘Garden of Love’ is a mental, symbolic garden, where a Chapel has both been there all the time and not been there; where the speaker has been able to play on the green even though a Chapel is constructed there, a structure he has managed to ignore until now. And as Gillham observes, if the Garden is of the mind, and the Chapel that despoils it is also of the mind, the corruption stems from the speaker’s own mental attitude rather than an external reality.

Or, to put it another way, it is the mental and moral views we bring to something that either taint it or brighten it. Someone who worshipped a religion that taught the worshipper to be suspicious of arcs of different colours would see little beauty in a rainbow!

A note on metre: like many Blake poems, ‘The Garden of Love’ is written in quatrains (rhymed, in this case,  abcb , although the final two lines of the final stanza depart from this and instead use internal rhyme on  gowns  and rounds and  briars and desires ), but instead of using tetrameter (i.e. four feet per line), Blake uses a more variable trimeter rhythm. This means there are three main stresses per line, rather than four:

I WENT / to the GAR- / den of LOVE, And SAW / what I NE- / ver had SEEN: A CHA- / pel was BUILT / in the MIDST, Where I USED / to PLAY / on the GREEN.

We have marked the breaks between each foot with a / mark. As you can see, the main pattern in each line (consistent in the first three lines) is to have a two-syllable foot (e.g. ‘And SAW’) followed by two three-syllable feet.

This means we can identify the basic ground-plan of the poem’s metre as something called  anapaestic trimeter , with iambic substitutions. In other words, in each of those first three lines we have an iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed) and then a pair of anapaests (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed).

As suggested above, the Christina Rossetti poem ‘Shut Out’ (1862) provides a neat complement to Blake’s poem, and may even have been written with it in mind. Like ‘The Garden of Love’, it is written in simple quatrains, albeit with a different rhyme scheme. You can read Rossetti’s poem, and our analysis of it, here .

If you enjoyed Blake’s ‘The Garden of Love’, you might also enjoy his ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ , our discussion of his great spring poem , and his poem ‘A Poison Tree’ .

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6 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Blake’s ‘The Garden of Love’”

“The Garden of Love” deserves to be one of the most memorable short lyrics in the English language. A favorite Blake lyric of Allen Ginsberg’s by the way.

And thanks for pointing us to the Christina Rossetti poem, new to me, which does seem to be a complementary expression reflecting in some part on the Blake.

And it wasn’t just organised religion Blake railed against; it was the whole of society!. He called it eternal Death or Ulro and put the ‘blame’ on Single Vision. To simplify his complex mythology he saw humankind as in a fallen state, largely because we have forgotten our ‘divinity’ and relied on the rationalising mind. Imagination and self-inquiry are necessary to release ourselves from Urizen’s manacles! It is sobering to think that things have got worse since his days. In many ways he predicted the wage-slave situation most of us find ourselves in today. And what about mechanisation/consumerism and the devaluing of the human spirit? I’ve even been told there are robot servants in Japan today!

Nice one, Mr Blake.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

Love this poem. It nails it on the head, the corruption of organised religion. When you look at how most religions end up, you have to agree with Blake!

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The Garden of Love

By William Blake

‘The Garden of Love’ is the antithesis to The Echoing Green of Innocence, as it uses the same setting and rhythm to stress the ugly contrast.

William Blake

Nationality: English

Initially unrecognized, William Blake posthumously emerged as a key Romantic poet.

Poem Analyzed by Dharmender Kumar

Degrees in English Literature, Mass Communication, and Law

Common in Blake’s poetry , he firmly believed that love cannot be sanctified by religion. The negative commandments of the Old Testament, ‘Thou Shall Not’ could not enshrine the most positive creative force on earth. For Blake, sexuality and instinct are holy, the world of institutionalized religion turns this instinct into imprisonment and engenders hypocrisy. Those rules, which forbid the celebration of the body, kill life itself.

Here, in ‘ The Garden of Love ‘, the poet rebels against the idea of original sin. Man was expelled for eating of the fruit of knowledge and, cast out of Eden, was shamed by sexuality. In the poem, the poet subverts orthodoxy and the patriarchal authority figures of the Nobodaddy and God and his Priests. The Dissenting tradition to which Blake’s family belonged believed in “inner light” and “the kingdom within”. Moral laws without any rationale are not to be obeyed. In ‘The Garden Love’, interfering priesthood and the powers of prohibition blight innocent affections. The Church of Experiences like the King and State relies on such powers to ensure obedience. A contemporary reference linked with the poem is that of the Marriage Act of 1753, passed by Lord Hardwicke. These Acts stipulated that all marriages had to be solemnized according to the rules of the Church of England in the Parish Church of one of the parties in the presence of a clergyman and two witnesses.

With the loss of rural society and extended families in villages, this legislation was perhaps necessary, especially in urban centers. However, for Blake, this was equal to curbing individual freedom. For him, each prohibition created repression, therefore in ‘The Garden of Love ,’ we see a bleak, unproductive landscape of unfulfilled yearning where sterile resentment, fear, guilt, and joylessness replace the open freedom of innocence.

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The Garden of Love  Analysis

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.

The twelve lines of William Blake’s poem ‘The Garden of Love’ belong to the state of Experience that characterizes the present-day world. Experience stands in total contrast to the state of Innocence.

The poet revisited the Garden of Love, an open green piece of land where he used to play with boys and girls together. He was dismayed to see there what he had never seen earlier. He found that in the green open place, a Chapel (church) had been erected in the middle of the place where boys and girls together used to play. Institutionalized religion thus destroyed the Garden of Love. In the world of Experience, the harmony between man and nature no longer existed. Earlier the Garden of Love seemed to be in a state of idyllic beauty, but the present-day scenario of the place is one of utter sadness and gloom.

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.

In the second stanza , the poet gives a further description of the place of his revisit. The gates of the Chapel were closed. And the closed-door had got written on it ‘Thou Shalt Not.’ So, the visitor (the poet) turned his attention to the place of the Garden of Love where it used to bloom a number of flowers but found them missing. In fact, the very idea of the chapel and the negative “Thou Shalt Not” suggests the concept of private property, which is the source of all inequality and helplessness in society. The gate is closed to the passerby and on it is inscribed the warning ‘Thou Shalt Not’. The warning is emblematic of the classic dictum of the Old Testament God-Jehovah who is seen as a prohibitive and a vindictive tyrant.

Stanza Three

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.

The lines of the third stanza depict the adverse changes that have enveloped the Garden of Love during the present time. The Garden portrays an aura of total unease and misery. At present, the garden seems to be filled with graves and tombstones which are images of death, and so horrendous and undesirable. Even the priests wrapped in black gowns forebode an ill-omen and an act of mourning and despair. The priests depict a total official manner devoid of any compassion or even forgiveness. This seems to be the basic factor that binds the narrator ’s desires and joy.

It could be that earlier, the Garden presented the state of innocence where an environment of gaiety and mirth prevailed and everybody could enter the place without any discrimination whatsoever. But now it seems that the Garden has been lent or sold out to a private individual who exerts the sole authority and hence, the others are devoid of any joyous moment. The present-day scene looks quite dismal where even such a simple resort as the garden is unable to escape the evils of industrialization and subsequent phenomenon of private ownership.

Personal Comments

‘The Garden of Love’ is another allegorical poem satirical of the Church. It is an attack on the morality which puts restrictions on sexual love. The speaker finds that a great change has come over the Garden of Love. He finds that a field of activities that should be spontaneously enjoyed has been made ugly by the interference of religious notions which insist on man’s guilt and shame. The Church has spoiled the beauty and natural vigor of the pleasures which were once there to be enjoyed and substituted reminders of man’s morality and eventual corruption, which are consequences of sin.

In ‘The Garden of Love ,’ there is a strong condemnation of the Church in its approach to sexual matters, and it is difficult not to agree with the attack made by the poet.

In all religion, there is a tendency to elevate the spiritual at the expense of the physical, and in all religions there are sects which take this tendency to an extreme, viewing the promptings of the body as low, especially the sexual urge. The effect poem falls on this aspect as well as on the prohibitions imposed by the “Chapel”. “Thou Shalt Not” does more than restrict activity: it alters the complications of doubt and perplexity. The damage done by the “briars” is self-imposed once they have been placed.

The speaker here relates a personal history: he talks of “my joys and desires” as being “bound”. He has now reached a position where he can see that what has been done to him was an evil. The tone of the poem is indignant, and the “priests in black gowns” are sinister figures. The obvious solution is to remove the evil by changing his notions about sexual matters and so liberating himself from the prohibitions imposed by the Chapel. But it may be too late for that.

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Excellent analysis! I love this website – it has greatly helped me with my university work. Always reliable with high quality analysis. My only comment is that the author’s personal note at the end was a bit off-putting. I think the beauty of this website is that it’s objective, but the personal note about the condemnation of the church was a bit uncalled for. That said, we all have freedom of speech and I love that we get to hear the writer’s insight. Going forward though, I think this site would benefit a lot from a more objective stance. Just a thought I had and think might be helpful for you going forward 🙂

Thank you for your feedback. Generally, we tend to be quite neutral. However, we do allow our writer’s a certain level of expression. I am glad you enjoy our articles.

Do you believe that this could have been a metaphorical garden? Or more literally. I feel that in this era of time it could have been quite literal because of different religious reformations that had just finished recently, and even his hatred of organized religion despite still being Christian.

Perhaps both! Blake was an ingenious poet. Even now when I read his poems I still find techniques that I didn’t spot when I was younger.

what are the themes in this poem,please someone tell me

Morality and religion.

A great insight and a joy to read. Very useful

That’s lovely feedback. Thank you.

That does explain a lot.

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Kumar, Dharmender. "The Garden of Love by William Blake". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/william-blake/the-garden-of-love/ . Accessed 7 September 2024.

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Poems & Poets

The Garden of Love

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.

The Garden of Love

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.

Summary of The Garden of Love

Analysis of literary devices used in “the garden of love”.

“ And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds.”

Analysis of Poetic Devices Used in “The Garden of Love”

Quotes to be used.

“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.”

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The Garden of Love

Analysis 001

Analysis 002, powerpoint presentation, recorded lesson 001, recorded lesson 00 2, recorded lesson 00 3, recorded lesson 00 4, recorded lesson 00 5, possible contextual questions.

The Poems of William Blake

The garden of love.

I 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.

The Poems of William Blake Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Poems of William Blake is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

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To whom is the request made in these lines

I think the speaker is referring to the stars.

“The poem Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree portrays the normal human society.”

I'm not sure that "normal" is the right word. A young man has killed his brother. We are not told why; the poet has focused his interest on the state of mind of the young man.

Study Guide for The Poems of William Blake

The Poems of William Blake study guide contains a biography of William Blake, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis of select poems by William Blake.

• About The Poems of William Blake
• The Poems of William Blake Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Poems of William Blake

The Poems of William Blake essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of William Blake's poetry.

• The Art of Paradox in William Blake's "London"
• To what extent is Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" apocalyptic?
• England's Loss of Innocence: An Examination of William Blake's Jerusalem
• William Blake's Abolitionism
• William Blake’s The Human Abstract: Comparison and Contrast: A Critique of “The Divine Image”?

E-Text of The Poems of William Blake

The Poems of William Blake e-text contains the full text of The Poems of William Blake.

• SONGS OF INNOCENCE
• THE SHEPHERD
• THE ECHOING GREEN
• THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

Wikipedia Entries for The Poems of William Blake

• Introduction