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"The Garden of Love" is a poem by the Romantic poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection, Songs of Experience .
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 tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires. [1]
The first two stanzas of the poem are written in a loose anapestic trimeter and rhyme abcb. [2] The third stanza begins in the same way, but the last two lines of this stanza make a sharp break with the form of the preceding stanzas. These concluding lines are written in tetrameter rather than trimeter, and they fail to maintain the abcb rhyme scheme. Instead the lines rhyme internally (gowns/rounds and briars/desires). These abrupt changes in versification serve to dramatize the changes that have taken place in this "Garden of Love."
Blake was a master of lyrical poetry, and one cannot understand him without pausing to appreciate such elements as the careful placement of capital letters, the deliberate hiccups in rhythm (lines 4 and 6), and the disorder that comes with line 11 as the previous order of trimeter suddenly tumbles into chaos with the force of the sudden tetrameter/pentameter (depending upon individual interpretation of rhythm). These last two lines suggest a previously ordered world tumbling into disorder.
William Blake was unorthodox in his views on theology, but at the same time heavily influenced by orthodox religion, as his art attests. He was deeply disturbed by poverty, child labor, prostitution, and hypocrisy of Church and oppressive nature of government. Understanding this about his personality serves one well in dissecting his poetry. One reading on "The Garden of Love" is that it was written to express Blake's beliefs on the naturalness of sexuality and how organised religion, particularly the Christian church of Blake's time, encouraged repression of natural desires.
If this is what Blake intended, it would have been a brave statement to make in his time due to the implied sexual reference, but much of the poetry of Blake and his contemporaries contained critique of the Church of England's hierarchical structure and influence on government. Blake's indignation at his subject matter is evident from the second line as he is talking about seeing "what I had never seen". He says he has "never" seen it although he must have grown up all his life being very aware of the Church's attitude towards sexuality. It can then perhaps be inferred that he is speaking from the point of view of innocence who has just entered the world of experience and is in a state of shock and sadness at how his previous freedoms have been blocked and squashed by the Church. "A chapel was built in the midst/ Where I used to play on the green" The "green" has special significance also as it mirrors the contrary poem in innocence "The Echoing Green" hence the reading of the "green" to represent previous, innocent freedom, as well as the more obvious "play".
A more common, alternate reading – and one more in keeping with what is known about Blake, his education and politics, and the times in which he lived – is that the poem simply reflects his views that the Church was an oppressor of free thought. Blake wrote the Songs of Innocence collection to reflect the innocence into which each human is born. Songs of Experience – from which this poem is drawn – points to the effects on the inherent innocence possessed by all, by the oppression of government and church, the Industrial Revolution, and lack of child labor regulations amongst the other evils of the coming modernism.
A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other.
"The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake, published in 1794 as part of his Songs of Experience collection and rising to prominence in the romantic period. The poem is one of the most anthologised in the English literary canon, and has been the subject of both literary criticism and many adaptations, including various musical versions. The poem explores and questions Christian religious paradigms prevalent in late 18th century and early 19th century England, discussing God's intention and motivation for creating both the "Lamb" and the eponymous "Tyger."
Common metre or common measure—abbreviated as C. M. or CM—is a poetic metre consisting of four lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The metre is denoted by the syllable count of each line, i.e. 8.6.8.6, 86.86, or 86 86, depending on style, or by its shorthand abbreviation "CM".
"The Lamb" is a poem by William Blake, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789.
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
In poetry, a ballad stanza is a type of a four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folk ballad. The ballad stanza consists of a total of four lines, with the first and third lines written in the iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines written in the iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme of ABCB. Assonance in place of rhyme is common. Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted the ballad stanza in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
"London" is a poem by William Blake, published in Songs of Experience in 1794. It is one of the few poems in Songs of Experience that does not have a corresponding poem in Songs of Innocence. Blake lived in London so writes of it as a resident rather than a visitor. The poems reference the "Two Contrary States of the Human Soul". The "Songs of Innocence" section contains poems which reference love, childhood and nature. Critics have suggested that the poems illustrate the effects of modernity on people and nature, through the discussion of dangerous industrial conditions, child labour, prostitution and poverty.
This is a glossary of poetry terms.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
Reality Sandwiches is a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published by City Lights Publishers in 1963. The title comes from one of the included poems, "On Burroughs' Work": "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." The book is dedicated to friend and fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso. Despite Ginsberg's feeling that this collection was not his most significant, the poems still represent Ginsberg at a peak period of his craft.
"The Wild Swans at Coole" is a lyric poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Written between 1916 and early 1917, the poem was first published in the June 1917 issue of the Little Review, and became the title poem in the Yeats's 1917 and 1919 collections The Wild Swans at Coole.
Earth's Answer is a poem by William Blake within his larger collection called Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It is the response to the previous poem in The Songs of Experience-- Introduction . In the Introduction, the bard asks the Earth to wake up and claim ownership. In this poem, the feminine Earth responds.
The Little Vagabond is a 1794 poem by English poet William Blake in his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience. His collection, Songs of Innocence, was originally published alone, in 1789. The scholar Robert Gleckner says that the poem is a form of transformation of the boy in the poem "The School Boy", from Songs of Innocence.
"Infant Joy" is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was first published as part of his collection Songs of Innocence in 1789 and is the counterpart to "Infant Sorrow", which was published at a later date in Songs of Experience in 1794.
"Home Thoughts, from Abroad" is a poem by Robert Browning. It was written in 1845 while Browning was on a visit to northern Italy, and was first published in his Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. It is considered an exemplary work of Romantic literature for its evocation of a sense of longing and sentimental references to natural beauty.
A hymn metre indicates the number of syllables for the lines in each stanza (verse) of a hymn. This provides a means of marrying the hymn's text with an appropriate hymn tune for singing.
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity is a nativity ode written by John Milton in 1629 and published in his Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). The poem describes Christ's Incarnation and his overthrow of earthly and pagan powers. The poem also connects the Incarnation with Christ's Crucifixion.
"Success is counted sweetest" is a lyric poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1859 and published anonymously in 1864. The poem uses the images of a victorious army and one dying warrior to suggest that only one who has suffered defeat can understand success.
"The Little Boy Found" is a poem by William Blake first published in the collection Songs of Innocence in 1789. Songs of Innocence was printed using illuminated printing, a style Blake created. By integrating the images with the poems the reader was better able to understand the meaning behind each of Blake's poems.
