‘The Garden of Love’ was first published in 1794 and was one of the series of poems in William Blake’s collection, Songs of Experience. These short poems explore the harsh realities of late 18th and early 19th Century life during the time of King George III, known as the Romantic Era. Each poem in the Songs of Experience category is matched by an idealistic portrayal in Songs of Innocence. The contrast is Blake’s method of social protest. ‘The Garden of Love’ is a poem of erotic frustration that directly challenges the role of organized religion in dictating the expression of human desires.

Love is presented allegorically and the ‘Garden ’ is of course the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were allowed freedom of innocent and uninhibited sexual expression. In this poem, after the fall of humankind, the sexual act has become one of shame and repression.

Note that the poem begins in a Pastoral mode, with reference to a simple bygone age of closeness to nature, but ends with a Gothic and negative depiction of a graveyard.

Structure
The poem is deceptively simple. It comprises five stanzas of four lines each, called quatrains. The rhythm is complex. The dominant metre is four iambic feet per line, known as tetrameters. However, the metric rhythm is varied. So, for example, in the first stanza lines two and four are shorter and notably emphatic, lacking sufficient syllables to fit a regular pattern. This device is known as catalectic metre.

Language and Imagery
The rhyme scheme is regular ABAB, CDCD to the last stanza, when a more complicated pattern of internal rhyme is introduced. Until stanza five the pattern unifies the verse, giving it a flow and trajectory that holds the reader’s attention.

The voice is in the first person and seems to be that of the poet; an intelligent, analytical, yet enormously compassionate observer.