liberty, free will and imagination

• blake believed spiritual and creative freedom were essential to a just society

  celebrates individuality, imagination and natural joy, especially in children
• key poems

  introduction (innocence)

  garden of love

  school boy
• ‘i stained the water clear,

  and i wrote happy songs

  every child may joy to hear’

  taming of nature

  steers reader in direction that innocence can be beautiful but becomes stained/imperilled

  particularly by actions of man, sense of threat to innocent + natural world
• ’i love to rise in a summer morn,

  when the birds sing on every tree;

  freedom + innocence, refreshing + enticing

  common elements of spring + blending natural sounds

  calm + unity w/ nature experienced by child that is free
• ‘to go to school in a summer morn,

  oh! it drives all joy away’

  regiment of school strips away harmony with nature

  joy of summer is ephemeral when restricted by institution of school
• ’how can the bird that is born for joy

  sit in a cage and sing?’

  bird + child paralleled, showcases unity w/ nature

  oppression

  unnatural image

  restriction causes child to wilt + wither

  child born innocent is corrupted by society
• schoolboy

  uses natural imagery + rhetorical questions with obvious answers to incite rebellion against strictures of school + regimented learning that strips children of joy and removes them from natural environment where they belong
• ’i went to the garden of love…

  a chapel was built in the midst,

  where i used to play on the green’

  personal experience impinged by church

  open, communal space denied

  lack of connection between people + nature

  industrialisation as nature is taken over by church

  manipulation of innocence + space of previous joy
• ‘’thou shalt not‘ writ over the door’

  barred entrance

  restrictive, framed in negative like 10 commandments
• ‘so i turned to the garden of love

  that so many sweet flowers bore’

  natural world

  idea of sexual pleasure + liberation

  natural love + virtue is turned to due to denial of church

  healthy sexuality + love destroyed by circumstances of society

  flowers= associated w/ nature + freshness + sexuality
• ’and tomb-stones where flowers should be’

  women unable to flourish

  destruction of once natural space

  filled with bodies of those failed by church and its teachings

  children should be playing there
• ’and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

  and binding with briars my joys and desires’

  internal/parallel rhyme destroying beauty of garden + emphasising activity

  making garden a desolation

  oppression + surveillance

  using natural world/plants to destroy natural world + natural desires

  thorns + brambles overtake, separating people

  echos ‘mind forged manacles’- conspiring to create sense of destruction