In this essay, I am going to discuss the theme of this poem by William Blake, and his meaning within the theme of the poem. The theme is a bit hard to find, but it’s easy to find the hints inside the poem, which makes the theme easier to conclude.

First, the author of the poem William Blake, was born in 1757 in London, and he died in 1827. The poem is written around the 1800s. The author lived all his life in London. His family were poor, and this might be seen in the poem, because it’s easy written without any difficult words. The poem is also written with traditional stanzas and lines, like three stanzas and four lines in each stanza.

Second, the word chains are simple and easy to connect. Words that mach are religous words : chapel (twice), graves, tomb-stones and a line from the bible “Thou shalt not”. The last line proves that there are religous thoughts behind the poem. There are also words connected to nature, among others words are garden (twice and also in the title) and flowers (twice). There are also nice wordchains and negative wordchains.

Third, in the two first stanzas, the rythm is completed by the maching end rhymes. End rhymes like seen and green in every second end makes the rythm easy to follow e.q : “[...]- I never had seen” and “ [....] – “play on the green”. Here seen and green are the rhymes , but the rhytm is to be broken at the third stanza. Here there are no end rhymes, but the rhymes is inside every second line e.q : 11 “And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds”. Here gowns and rounds are the rhymes.

-, The changes are important. In the first stanza, the wordchains show mostly nature words and nice words, and only one religous word. In the second stanza, things are happening. Here we fint nature words, nice words, more religous words, and negative words. In the third stanza, there are two nice words, two nature words, two negative words and five religous words. This shows the devellopment in religious words which might reveal the theme. In this case I would say the theme is religion.

As I have said, the theme is concluded to be religion, but why does the writer mean with a poem written in this religous way?

The poem is written in first person the singular. It is the writer who is telling the story. I would say that the writer is telling us about how things were in the old days. He is telling us about the garden he used to play in. The garden of love as he refer to. Here he used to have lots of fun, until one day when suddenly someone had built a chapel on the green, and a chuchyard around. He tells that the gates to the ‘playground’ is closed, and there are priests walking around patroling the graveyards. It looks like the writer is complaining about his loss of “the garden of love” to the effect of the religious immigration. That was my opinion about the poem, do you have anything to say?