The Garden of Love: Church and Human Desires

William Blake was born in an era where the Church had a lot of influence over the state; his perspective towards the Church was considered a drastic movement during his time. For people to understand Blake’s work, the individual needs to be inform of his religious beliefs and ideals. “As a child his family and he attended the Moravian Church” (The Literature Network). “The Moravian Church was part of the Eastern Orthodox Church which is second largest single Christian communion in the world after the Roman Catholic Church.” (Wikipedia) The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and would remain a source of inspiration throughout his life and influence his works. “He consider himself a monistic Gnostic which meant that he believed what saved a person's soul was not faith but knowledge”(Analyzing William Blake’s Poetry). This ideal of faith made Blake see the founding of a conventional church as a mechanism of authoritarism; giving the Church the right to tell its members what to or not do. In “The Garden of Love”, which is found in the second volume of Blake’s poetry Songs of Experience, his ideal of church becomes concrete; he uses imagery and symbolism to show how organized religion strives to restrict human impulses.

In the first stanza the speaker writes that a Chapel has been build in the Garden of Love “Where I used to play in the green” (4). This image is symbolic of the church trying to control Blake’s childlike impulses by building a church where he used to play. The speaker uses words such as “garden” which draws an image of life enjoyment; “love” which can be related to hope and the appreciation of life itself; and “green” which gives an idea of something that is alive; these words gives the reader a positive image of the place where he once used to play and now is replace by a Church.

Blake continues in the second stanza to describe how the church or organized religion strives to restrict human impulses. He writes “the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not writ over the door” (5-6) The gates of the chapel being shut symbolizes the fact that the church was separated from the ordinary man and tried to exclude the individual from building a personal relationship and understanding of God. Such a personal knowledge of God was discouraged by the church, which taught its members that it alone dictated the will of God. That inclination of the church brings Blake to the “Thou shalt not writ over the door”, which is an allusion to the Ten Commandments. The church was constantly telling its members what they were not supposed to do and trying to dictate every part of their lives, which took joy and happiness out of many things in life.

In the third stanza, Blake discovers the flowers that used to be in his Garden of Love had been replaced by “tombstones”. The flowers symbolize the joys of life, and the tombstones represent