subversion of marriage, morality + the body

• blake rejects traditional sexual morality

  especially church’s role in condemning desire + binding people in unhappy roles
• key poems

  garden of love

  a little girl lost

  clod and pebble

  sick rose
• ’children of the future age’

  ‘know that in a former time

  love! sweet love! was thought a crime’

  addressed + told of sexual repression that was an aspect of present age

  condemning current beliefs surrounding love + desire

  attempting to force people to evaluate own beliefs that could be seen as abhorred to future generations
• ’in the age of gold,

  free from winter’s cold,

  youth and maiden bright

  to the holy light,

  naked in the sunny beams delight’

  moves to describe prelapsarian world

  when adam + eve could enjoy sexual + physical pleasure without guilt

  image of garden of eden

  removes societal stigmas surround sexuality

  attempts to show that it‘s humanity + church’s teachings that prevent us from accepting human aspect of desire
• ’to her father white

  came the maiden bright;

  but his loving look,

  like the holy book,

  all her tender limbs with terror shook’

  blake subverts image of pastoral innocence by showing reality of parental authority + sexual repression

  shows how older, more experienced oppress innocent and steer them away from freedom of sexual liberty + free love
• little girl lost protest

  explores contrary perceptions to expose + attack social problems surround love + sex
• clod and pebble explores competing ideas of love

  imposition of humanity onto natural world vs eden, idyllic world

  liberation vs oppression

  primal relationship w/ god vs organised arbitrated experience

  idea of heaven + hell

  distance from god meaning freedom? part of human experience
• ’love seeketh not itself to please,

  nor for itself hath any care’

  immediate personification of love

  image of self-sacrifice gives christian connotations

  draws on long tradition of christian thought surrounding love + forgiveness
• ’but for another gives its ease,

  and builds a heaven in hell’s despair’

  image of self sacrifice for another's benefit

  classical idea of harrowing of hell

  love as creative force
• ’so sang a little clod of clay,

  trodden with the cattle’s feet’

  carefree joy

  clay links to edenic creation

  malleable + deformed by others

  cattle unconcerned w/ others existence= imperceptive

  victim of cattle + lack of care

  like human beings

  this idea of love destroyed by humans carelessness + society
• ’a pebble of the brook’

  opposed immediately to clod

  covered in water, opposing dirty nature of clod
• ’love seeketh only self to please,

  to bind another to its delight…

  and builds a hell in heaven’s despite’

  complete opposite of 1st stanza

  love= forced happiness, no control or freedom

  opposition created selfish view of love

  contractual nature of love

  married by force/circumstance becomes hellish, against ideas of heaven

  no comment at end, leaves to resolve itself
• ‘o rose, thou art sick’

  drawn into symbolic landscape, rose is personified?

  rose as messenger/symbol

  ramifications of love, life + beauty

  become representative of blighting of love

  deciding her feeling= diagnostic

  rose lacks voice
• ’the invisible worm’

  sense of concealment, deception, secrecy

  link to dark + unnatural

  tension between worm + rose

  death + dirty vs life, youth, virginity

  rose passivity due to worms activity?
• ‘found out thy bed

  of crimson joy’

  bed belongs to rose

  shame, secrecy, force?

  worm as reason for sickness

  bed tainted by invasion of worm into feminine, private world
• ’his dark secret love

  does thy life destroy’

  immoral desire? is it truly love, seems shameful due to hidden nature

  love + destroy linked

  society’s belief a woman is destroyed by unordained marriage