ENG 210 Blogpost 1/30

I chose the poem "The Garden of Love" by William Blake as my subject to study for its aesthetics. The period of life being addressed here in this poem is one that has to do with dealing with change. The change that the narrator is addressing, is one from childhood to adulthood. The "garden of love" or "chapel" that the narrator speaks of is one that he visited a lot when he was a small boy to see the flowers and greens. Now the garden he once enjoyed as a small boy, is overrun with graves, clergy, and a gated chapel with "thou shalt not" written above the door. This poem is written in stanza form made up of three quatrains. The rhyming pattern is ABCB with the last stanza being ABCD with no rhyming pattern to signify the death and decay that has overwhelmed the beauty that once entranced the narrator as a child. The symbolic meaning of the flowers that once grew in the garden is love. But, now, the clergy have built a chapel and filled the garden with graves to signify the displeasure that the narrator feels when organized religion denies men the right to their pleasures and instinctive desires. The "Thou shalt not" written above the door only strengthens this argument. The feel that this writing gives off is one of change going from beauty to sadness and anger. The words in the first stanza have a "beautiful" feeling to them with a nature feel, and with the progression of the poem the words in the second and third stanzas had a feeling of destruction and denial, with the use of words such as "gated", "door", "graves", and "binding". These words give off a very mechanical feeling in which we can no longer see or feel the nature that was once present in that Garden of Love.