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In the Garden of Love Blake talks about how the green, the place of childhood play has been corrupted by a repressive religious morality. Blake describes the Garden as being 'filled with graves and tombstones', this confirms his criticism of restrictive conventional morality. Contrary to the view that pleasure leads to corruption, Blake believed that it was the suppression of desire, not the enactment of it that produced negative effects. Blake hated organised religion, and the Garden of Love explores some of the restrictions he saw and detested in the church. The chapel is not therefore the welcoming and opening place that we might expect, but is imposing and forbidding.
The gates are shut to prevent approach and the chapel announces itself within the prohibition 'Thou shalt not'. Blake saw organised religion as being profoundly at odds with the spirit of freedom and life. The disturbing image of the priests in black gowns... walking their rounds' makes them seem more like policemen of morality rather than priests of Christ. Blake emphasises his dislike of the priests by connecting the positive and negative with internal rhymes in the final two lines of the poem 'gowns' and 'rounds', 'briars' and 'desires'.
It is clear that joy and desires have no place in the priest's perceptions of life. In 'The Chimney sweeper' in Songs of Innocence Blake begins by emphasising the speaker's isolation. He is motherless and has been sold by his father to s chimney sweep. The overtones of slavery here are significant, especially when we consider that, since he is blackened by soot, this sweep is another little black boy. Blake emphasises how young he is through his inability to pronounce the word 'sweep' ('weep, weep, weep, weep') a pun which also picks up on the boys sadness and tears. The physical and mental oppression of the child are highly expressed in this poem.
The parent being figures of authority sells their child to a chimney sweep possibly for income, but is it worth the life of the child? In the 'Chimney sweeper' in songs of experience, the possibility that the parents have gone to church to pray because of a sense of guilt and shame for selling their son as a sweep is undermined as the poem progresses. Because their son still dances and sings, 'they think they have done me no injury' they seem to be deliberately turning a blind eye to reality and to the needs of their child. The parents use the child's apparent happiness to justify their continued exploitation of him. This I consistent with the religious hypocrisy implied at the end of the poem, as the parents praise God, presumably for their new found source of Income. Profoundly suspicious of organised religion, Blake ends the poem by focusing on the contraries of heaven and 'misery' in a phrase similar to that in the 'Clod and the pebble'.
The parents of the chimney sweeper have, through their own selfishness, built a hell for their child. Blake's exploration of the different kinds of authority varies in the book, in 'The little boy lost' he emphasises how the earthly father abandons his household and children in contrast to the heavenly father who comes in search of the missing child. The logical extension of these views was for Blake to see those who enforced this type of passive 'morality' as figures of undesirable repression, the corrupter's of natural behaviour.
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Research essay sample on Sweeper In Songs Garden Of Love Blake
