William Blake's "The Garden of Love"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2021

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his prophetic works were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".[2] His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".[3] In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.[4] While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham,[5] he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God"[6] or "human existence itself".[7]

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, November 30th, 2021.
0:06.4	Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving after a brief break from the podcast to celebrate and relax and enjoy the holiday with family.
0:14.9	We were back, and we'll have four poems this week, it being Tuesday today, and then I'll keep going,
0:20.0	and then we'll have a couple days off for Christmas as well, although we will definitely dive into soon.
0:25.3	Christmas and Advent-themed poems, as we do every year, maybe even a few repeats from previous
0:31.2	years, just because they're so good. But on today's episode, the poem is by William Blake.
0:37.1	His birthday was November 28th, so it seemed
0:39.6	appropriate to do one here on November 30th that was written by him. This is called The Garden of
0:44.4	Love. It was part of his collection called Songs of Experience, which I will have something more to say
0:50.1	about in just a second. Of course, William Blake lived from 1757 to 1827. He was a poet and a painter
0:57.0	and a printmaker and is certainly one of the most important poets of the Romantic Age. So this is his poem,
1:06.5	The Garden of Love. I went to the Garden of Love.
1:15.7	I went to the Garden of Love and saw what I had never seen.
1:22.2	A chapel was built in the midst where I used to play on the green.
1:29.6	And the gates of this chapel were shut, and thou shalt not writ over the door.
1:36.7	So I turned to the Garden of Love that so many sweet flowers bore.
1:48.4	And I saw it was filled with graves, in tombstones where flowers should be, and priests in black gowns, or walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires.
1:59.2	Blake is one of those fascinating figures who's known perhaps more for his oddities than perhaps even, you know, for his work.
2:09.3	He wrote Tiger, Tiger, but, you know, a lot of people probably know that poem without knowing who he is.
2:15.1	But when you hear about the name William Blake, you might think of
2:19.5	his sort of idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. And yet for all that, when you combine his poetry and
2:25.7	his visual art, his painting and printmaking and so forth, he's one of the most essential people
	...

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