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In his own words

The Garden of Love

William Blake · 1757-1827 · From Songs of Experience (1794)

I laid me down upon a bank, Where Love lay sleeping;I heard among the rushes dank Weeping, weeping.
Then I went to the heath and the wild, To the thistles and thorns of the waste;And they told me how they were beguiled, Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.
I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen;A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;So I turned to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves, And tombstones where flowers should be;And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.

The speaker returns to the green where he used to play and finds a chapel built on it, with a prohibition written over the door. This edition opens the poem with two stanzas Blake left in his notebook.

The poems are in the public domain. The texts here follow Poems of William Blake, Project Gutenberg ebook 574, reproduced verbatim, punctuation included. That late 19th century text keeps the famous Tyger spelling while smoothing some others, so a few lines read slightly differently than in Blake's original etched plates. Songs of Innocence first appeared in 1789, Songs of Experience in 1794, combined by Blake into one book whose title page promises to show the two contrary states of the human soul. The introductions and groupings are ours.