The Garden of Love: Notes

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This Songs of Experience lyric deals with the repression of joys, desires and instincts by the church and by prohibitive morality. The speaker, presumably no longer a child, returns to the Garden of Love, and sees that earlier pastoral and natural vision of Love transformed by the influence of the Chapel, and by the 'Priests in black gowns' . Given that the poem deals with a vision of a journey into the "garden", it is worthwhile to see the poem as a commentary on the ways that conscience and guilt are imposed on the Imagination and on what is natural and instinctual, the 'mind-forged manacles' of London. In Freudian psychological terms this would correspond to the Superego's policing of the Id. It is also worth noting that the references to playing "on the green" hark back to a recurrent image in the Songs of Innocence sequence.

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