Meter and Rhythm in the Poem Garden Of Love by William Blake Essay

Meter and Rhythm in the Poem Garden Of Love by William Blake - Essay Example At the age of 25 Blake married Catherine Boucher, and in 1785 he opened a print shop that failed and left him to eke out a miserable living with inadequate numbers of orders for designs and engravings. During the Napoleonic Wars not many people in England could afford the high cost of contracting the work of an engraver. In 1804 Blake was charged with sedition but was acquitted, because a drunk had wrongly accused him. In 1809 his single art exhibition of sixteen works went unnoticed by everyone except a lone critic who criticized it fiercely. Blake's literary work was so highly influenced by the politics of his time that it most likely hurt his success as an engraver. In the last years of his life, Blake met a group of young artists whose appreciation for his work eased his growing destitution. William Blake died on August 12, 1827.2 The poem is found in the anthology Songs of Innocence and of Experience. William Blake was so little recognized in his lifetime that the author only managed to write and sell his poetry intermittently over his professional career, and his poetic work was essentially little known or regarded by his contemporaries. Blake at first only wrote poetry in his spare time. Though Blake acquired some repute as an engraver and an artist, those who recognized his genius still commonly believed him to be somewhat eccentric in his own time.4 The Garden of Love, speaks fr... etime that the author only managed to write and sell his poetry intermittently over his professional career, and his poetic work was essentially little known or regarded by his contemporaries. Blake at first only wrote poetry in his spare time. Though Blake acquired some repute as an engraver and an artist, those who recognized his genius still commonly believed him to be somewhat eccentric in his own time.4 The Garden of Love, speaks from a first person viewpoint to set the individual's early experience of the spiritual loveliness of the natural world in stilted contrast with the intrusion of the unforgiving man-made constructs of religious observance. The narrator returns to the lost innocence of childhood, once experienced in its natural ambience, to revive the uplifting memory of the long-forgotten bliss of a Garden sanctuary, only to find it pointlessly spoiled by a man-made Chapel - metaphorically representing the imposition of the censorious rules and strictures of an adult religious life - overwhelming the once-healthy lighthearted and carefree ambience of his youth.5 The carefully chosen imagery of the garden and youth characterize the early experience of creation in its pristine state as the natural ambience for the exuberant child in the unaffected transparency and original innocence reminiscent of the Biblical Garden of Eden.6 The incursion of the Chapel erected in the midst of the Garden, which the narrator "never had seen" as a youth, imposes the unnatural structure of organized religion whose detrimental influence begins to escalate as the poem communicates more of its closed and censorious nature in the following stanzas. The inert stone edifice of the Chapel supplanting the promise and freedom of the green - a conventional metonymy for promise and