POEMS COMPARISON

Poems Comparison

Poems Comparison

The Garden Of Love

"The garden of love" by William Blake is a complex and emotional sonnet beneficiating from a simple but nonetheless effective a/b/a/b rhyme scheme.

The poem starts in a calm and harmonious place where the environment offers a docile but nonetheless cold and humid background in which the reader plunges with a powerful feeling of drowsiness '' I laid upon a bank, where love lay sleeping, heard among the rushes dank, weeping weeping''.

We can here notice the repetition of the word weeping, to reinforce the effect of passive lamentations introduced by the previous lines.

The sentence '' where love lay sleeping'' introduces the fact that the speaker is not foreign to this environment and has witnessed or even experienced something that had to have an impact on his life as he came back once again seeking what he has lost.

''Then I went to the Heath and the wild{........}And they told me how they were beguiled.....driven out and compelled to the chaste''

The speaker advances trough the land as an experimented adventurer familiar with the place. A sort of communion of soul and spirit appears to happen as the speaker not only walks with elation but also seems to communicate with his suddenly personified ("they told me'') surrounding environment delude by guile ''And they told me they were beguiled''

The poem seems to take a more complex turn at this point as the reader can notice the multiple biblical allusions. ''Driven out and compelled by the Chaste'' the word chaste is of course dubious at this state of the poem but still manages to signal the presence of religion in a place that used to be wild and free. The word ''beguile'' is also not innocently used by the author, if referring to the bible the word is used in the very beginning of the genesis by eve '' The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat'' reinforcing by such means the underlying force of religion bound to come to the surface in such place.

''I went to the garden of love and saw what i had never seen'' this very sentence aledges the assumptions that the speaker was not indigenous to such environment. Although no statement is made to clarify the nature of the garden the reader can suppose without already knowing what role religion will play in this poem that the garden could be put in correlation with The Garden of Eden. "A chapel was constructed within the midst where I used to play on the green'' the introduction of the chapel here serves to finally clarify the preceding underlying declarations and introduce a pitch of revolt. The author is lost and his despite for the church begins to be appearant, as his Garden dramastically changed and is almost unrecognizable under the mighty powerful structure of the church,crushing his childhood memories ''where I used to play in the green'' and taking over the land and the author's life as an occupying ...