The GARDEN of LOVE

Perhaps the scarcity of critical commentary on Blake's "The Garden of Love" can be traced directly to Harold Bloom's designation of it in 1963 as "the poorest of the Songs of Experience" (149). Bloom continues by positing th e simplicity of the poem and wondering if it "might perhaps have been better left in the Notebook" (149). One year later, E.D. Hirsch agrees with Bloom about the simplicity of the poem in his work, Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake, but he continues by theorizing that the poem contains a "prophetic" dimension that "is usually not noticed" (258). For Hirsch, the poem cunningly explores the idea of "the innocence of Experience" (258) by creating a speaker whose attachment to earlier, more innocent values prevents him/her from realizing the fall into experience until after it has already occurred.

In Blake's Contrary States, D.G. Gillham takes issue with both Bloom and Hirsch in the most detailed commentary on the poem to that point. For Gillham, the speaker undergoes not a corruption of innocence, but a change within experience itself. Gillham theorizes that the "garden of love" is a metaphor for the speaker's earlier experiences with sexual love; thus, the change in the garden brought about by the priests symbolizes the effect that organized religion has in stifling one's sexual desires.

John Adlard's brief notation in the 1971 Blake Newsletter observes that the "binding with briars" from the last line of the poem is an actual occurrence "seen in graveyards in Blake's day and up till Victorian times" (147). Adlard explains that briars were used to hold the turfs over graves in position, and he then concludes by pointing out that the briarbound grave on the plate of "The Garden of Love" must be more than purely symbolical.

A decade later, Elaine M. Kauvar revisits the seemingly forgotten poem when she discusses it in her essay, "Landscape of the Mind: Blake's Garden Symbolism." In the essay, Kauvar asserts that the poem "illuminates Blake's concept o f organic nature" (60). Kauvar continues by postulating that "the emblematic garden reflects the state of vegetable nature - thriving or decaying" (60). Thus Kauvar implicitly (and somewhat circularly) argues that the changes in the garden reflect chang es in the perception of the speaker himself, so that the vegetation in the garden is dead or dying because of the speaker's perception that "abstract, moral law [has] withered the primal vigor of Innocence" (60).

Also in 1980, Diana Hume George explores "The Garden of Love" from a different critical perspective. In her text, Blake and Freud, George reads the poem as a "symbolic treatment of the oedipal phase in the psyche of the mal e" (104). George posits that the mother is the erotic garden of love that must wither and die for the child who, upon entering experience, is forced by the father/priest to sublimate any erotic feelings for the mother. George then complicates her own re ading by theorizing the poem can be more broadly conceived as an analogy for "all repression of desire through organized religion" (105). George concludes convincingly by asserting that psychoanalytic readings of Blake (such as her own) open rather than close the text.

Zachary Leader indicts the speaker of the poem in his work from 1981, Reading Blake's Songs. According to Leader, critical commentary on "The Garden of Love" has been misled both by the neatness of the speaker's indignation and the obviousness of the external forces that bring about the sudden transformation of the garden. Leader theorizes that the speaker himself must bear some responsibility for the transformation that renders his love sinful since his "joys and desires" are the ones being bound. Leader supports this assertion by cleverly pointing out that the speaker's words undermine themselves on the plate by sprouting thorns underground (173).

Finally, Stanley Gardner explores the linear narrative of the poem by explicating each verse in turn. According to Gardner in his 1986 text Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced, the poem moves "from a simple, factual expectation, though a narrative of real, contemporary exclusion and repression, to finish in a symbolic exposition: 'And binding with briars my joys and desires'" (141). Thus, for Gardner, the speaker remains rooted in place while looking backward to in nocence and forward through experience to death itself - a death emphasized and finalized by the fact that the priest's hand in the plate points the reader both to the grave and to the text.

Penn Perry (December 1995)

Adlard, John. "'The Garden of Love.'" Blake Newsletter IV (1971), 147-48.

Bloom, Harold. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. 149.

Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. London: The Athlone Press, 1986. 139-41.

George, Diana Hume. Blake and Freud. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. 104-06.

Gillham, D.G.. Blake's Contrary States: The "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" as Dramatic Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966. 178-79.

Hirsch, E.D.. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964. 258-59.

Kauvar, Elaine M.. "Landscape of the Mind: Blake's Garden Symbolism." Blake Studies 9 (1980), 57-73.

Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 172-74.