ENGL200 Week 2: Blake’s Garden of Love
Week 1 was a good introduction to the Nineteenth century(or return in my case), particularly because we are already getting stuck into Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. Im leaving my critique of Shaw until we have seen the theatre so heres my ideas on William Blake’s The Garden of Love.
Synopsis: Blake’s favourite garden of flowers got crushed by a holy church and its gravestones.
Why is such a story important? Poems dont thrive on their storyboards. Its the poetic effect it has on its reader and the metaphorical meanings are what matters most in terms of art(at least in a poem medium).
Blake most prominently is attacking the church for its oppressive control over social behaviour, that being love. Blake’s representation of love, I dont think just applies to its literal sense, but to all forms of joys as the last line suggests; ‘And binding with briars my joys and desires’. He suggests that the church is closed off to the world and only concerned with telling people what not do to, and what to do ‘And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not writ over the door;’
To further portray his disgust he replaces the garden of love with graves and tombstones symbolising the death of love. Blake also utilises rhyming to generate a feeling of repetitveness of the priests making their rounds in the graveyard that now polluted his once ‘garden of love’.
Lastly ‘Where I used to play on the green.’ is the line which illustrates that it wasnt always this way. The church may of been harmonious with love but now it seems it has turned into an omen. Now the church seems to bind new ‘joys and desires’ for he no longer has his garden to love with a deathly oppressive institution to replace it.
Nineteenth Century Literature 
Romantics rely on emotions to empower their art. WIth such tragedy, one would think PU would be more pessimistic and negative. Instead its Franky that gets the negative butt for knowledge as a dangerous tool. Such an interesting character; Percy Shelley
http://crystalcaran18.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/engl200-week-3q-1/comment-page-1/#comment-4
I like the ideas you shared in this response. It’s really interesting how Blake shows his disgust in such a beautifully written poem. It’s interesting to note that, if Blake was writing a poem with those ideas today (2 centuries later), the poem wouldn’t differ greatly as organised religion continues to repress humanity’s natural desires.
I like the ideas you shared in this response. It’s really interesting how Blake shows his disgust in such a beautifully written poem. It’s interesting to note that, if Blake was writing a poem with those ideas today (2 centuries later), the poem wouldn’t differ greatly as organised religion continues to repress humanity’s natural desires.
The only changes I would make to this response are changes to punctuation.
For example, use of apostrophes.
Im= I’m *
dont= don’t*
wasnt = wasn’t*