Deprivation through Christian Religion in William Blake The Garden of Love

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English Composition                Clara Favre        

Deprivation through Christian Religion in William Blake “The Garden of Love”

In “The Garden of Love”, William Blake claims the fall of human being from innocence to experience. In William Blake’s poetry, innocence (Song’s of innocence) is synonymous with purity, childhood and nature whereas experience (Song’s of experience) is synonymous with adulthood, mankind’s work and the notion of good and evil. Indeed, childhood is the time of innocence while adulthood is strongly connoted by a dualistic system such as religion. In Blake’s poetry, Christian religion is Manichean as there is a constant struggle between good and evil. In “The Garden of Love”, the poetic persona is nostalgic of his childhood when he was connected to an infinite nature and where everything seemed possible. Nevertheless, this place has changed and has been replaced by an austere “chapel”. The joyful and light milieu becomes enclosed, claustrophobic and morbid. This implicates a tension between past and present, desires and restrictions. Consequently, in “the Garden of Love” religion is negatively connoted. Blake uses the image of the edenic fall from innocence to knowledge in order to demonstrate the actual fall of Religion into austerity. Christian religion emphasizes life after death. Thence, Blake criticises Christian religion as an order that curbs innocence and desire by intending to replace them with rules and restrictions. In contrast to Christian religion, Blake ennobles life before death.    

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“The Garden of Love” (I, 1) can be understood as a symbol of the fall of a child from innocence into the restrictions’ reality of Christianity. “The Garden of Love” is a place “where [the poetic persona] used to played on the green”. The word “play[ ]” represents childhood. This open broad space can be seen as a metaphor of hope and happiness. The “green” suggests that the child is connected to nature. However when the speaker says: “And I saw what I never seen: A Chapel was built in the midst”, he asserts that his “Garden of Love” has been replaced ...

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