The Garden Of Love And Earth's Answer By William Blake Poem Summary

Through most of his poems, William Blake seems to be a very religious man. He writes about a higher power and about the day of redemption. In his other poems such as “The Garden of Love” and “Earth’s Answer”, he criticizes organized religion, particularly the Christian church of Blake 's time, mainly for their preaching on the sins of our natural desires. As a member of the catholic church, some these poems almost seemed offensive to me when I first read them. Then I began to grasp what Blake was trying to describe. I found myself relating a lot of what he wrote to in his poems to present day problems and then even agreeing with some of his points. In William Blake’s “The Garden of Love”, he writes about a beautiful place that he visited in …show more content…
This poem mostly keeps a rhyme scheme of ABAAB with a couple close rhymes in the first, third, and fourth stanza. I believe that the biggest clue that you could take from just the structure of “Earth Answer” would be how Blake emphasizes every third and fourth of every stanza. The lines are shorter than the others which make the readers pause and stat they completely separate from the rest of the poem. It gives the impression of lament and takes on a very accusing tone. The plate that William Blake designed for this poem does not have any people or actions going on in it. It is simple in both colors and shapes with graceful vines winding around the borders and the words. Not only do the vines go in between every stanza, they also seem to point to the shorten third and fourth line of each stanza, punctuating these lines even more. The plate is a lot more peaceful than the text of the poem. “Earth’s Answer” can be seen as a response to the call of the bard in Blake’s “Introduction” at the very beginning of his Songs of Experience. The bard calls,(3)“O Earth O Earth return! Arise from out the dewy grass;....Rises from the slumberous mass.” He asks the earth to, (3) “Turn away no more:” The earth lifts up her head as she hears the bard, but she was not asleep in on the dewy grass as the bard had said. Instead, she has been imprisoned in the darkness, bound with “heavy chain”. Earth believes that she is the prisoner of …show more content…
The topics of sex and free love are a controversial idea. You can see in recently in the news in the form of the fight for marriage equality for homosexuals.In today’s era, females are more much more restricted than males when it comes to free love. A girl is told constantly that she should guard her virginity and remain perfect for her husband while it is the complete opposite for guys. Boys who have never experienced intimacy are ridiculed and called “lame” or “gay”. There’s a saying that I’ve heard a couple times that tries to explain why there is this difference. It goes “When you have one key that opens many doors, it is a master key. But if you have a door that can be opened by many keys then the door is junk.” The shaming of sexual desires is still notably present in the current Catholic faith. People are ashamed of the things that they do that the church has deemed “un-pure”, such as sex outside of marriage or having an intense love for intimacy. Once a beautiful and natural thing, love and sex are now both repressed and shamed. This hindering of free love is not a new idea and it is not one that will be solved anytime soon. Blake was just one of the first to question the church’s restraint on free