William Blake Essay

William Blake Essay

Romanticism was an intellectual and literary movement that glorified the past and nature, and opposed ideas such as capitalism and industrialism. In William Blake’s “The Garden of Love”, a poem published as part of his collection Songs of Experience, he emphasizes his admiration for nature and the way things used to be, and shows his disdain towards the order and restrictions imposed by the church. In Blake’s “Jerusalem”, the reincarnation of a fellow poet, John Milton, speaks to Blake, also mentioning these key Romanticist ideals and themes.

As a Romantic, William Blake has a strong love for nature and the beauty of something being untouched. He glorifies the “old days” and longs for a time much like his childhood. In “Garden of Love”, when Blake discovers that a chapel has been built on a field where he used to play as a child he says, “So I turned to the Garden of Love that so many sweet flowers bore” (7-8). When Blake sees that the place that represents his childhood, his innocence, and his love for the natural world has been infiltrated by a chapel, he turns to the only untouched natural part of this place to find solace. The image of the chapel represents the restrictions the church has placed upon society, which Blake strongly disagrees with. In the last stanza, Blake contrasts the church and nature, “And I saw it was filled with graves, And tombstones where flowers should be” (9-10). The tombstone images represent the structure of the church and the flower images represent the unaltered aspects of nature. Blake wants to show how the structure of the church lessens the beauty of the natural world, because the beauty lies within the fact that nature is unaffected by man.

William Blake shows his contempt for the restrictions the church has placed on society today, but he does have appreciation for the holiness and religious ideals that it represents. To Blake, the church and the doctrine are repressive, but not necessarily the religious beliefs. These beliefs are shown in his poem “Jerusalem”, which calls for a natural promise land where mankind can escape for the Industrial Revolution and the urbanism of this time. In “Garden of Love”,

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