The Garden of Love by William Blake
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
A Response to the Garden of Love by Gorgelia Pollard
I too went to the Garden of Love,
And just like my father before
Saw words writ over the door:
“For in this garden you are blessed”
I turned and saw a garden redeemed:
A gate was overtaken by the vines of roses
And the ground burst with flowers of all types
And revealed those insects touched by the divine.
No hint of evil dared into the holy garden,
For even death tip-toed through the green grass;
I left the garden satisfied with what I had seen
For love was indeed in the garden.
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Love the idea that you composed a "response to" Blake's poem, particularly considering some of the poems-in-dialogue we've looked at this semester (e.g. Coleridge's "Rime" and Robinson's "The Haunted Beach"). What is perhaps most intriguing about this response is your effort to redeem the garden that Blake turned black w/ experience. I can appreciate the natural imagery as the mode for such redemption; but I was struck more by the fact that the natural world (as Thel would see it) forces death to "tip-toe through"--as if permanence is overwritten in favor of continual process. In this way, love can stand for the infinite, the cyclical...
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