Ecchoing Green and Garden of Love Jacks

• Perspective — first person plural; unified image

• Auditory imagery — bell motif — creates a melodic and cheerful atmosphere. Could also be alluding to church which will soon preside over it.

• Universality — “Old John” — monosyllabic English name cliche — idyll in which all of the elderly bask in the joys of youths

• Contraries: old and young — the old “laugh” and lament over their time on the village commonspace; the children partake in sports and being merry before returning to their mothers

• Symbol: birds — “birds in their nest” — associated with freedom and also fragility

• Passing of time — “darkening green” reframes the previous “ecchoing green” which emphasises the passing of time. This could also be a metaphor for ageing.

• Rhyme - conveys harmony, between nature and humans

• Echoing motif - Conveys the cyclical and repeated nature of life, with young and old shown.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)

• Rhyming couplets — harmonious

• Enjambment — unrestricted play

• Rhyme scheme falls into disarray: ABCB → internal — exclusion from within the church

• Motif of flowers — flowers associated with youth but also fertility — poem could be addressed as either about the death on imagination or the Church’s imposition on sex

• Doorway symbol — clipped commandment on the door emphasises how the Church’s dogma lies upon restriction of the human experience. Could also be a metaphor for exclusion or the Church ironically using the messages of god while shutting off from his teachings.

• Imagery of death/darkness — Gothic imagery e.g gravestones and priests in black gowns — sharp contrast to the colourful image of a flower field

• Internal rhyme — links religion and politics with the restriction of joy and the death of desires — explicit framing of Blake’s blame

• Contraries: pastoral versus urban setting — contrasts the colours and also the Romantic versus Gothic imagery which emphasises the extent of the enforced changes

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)

• Quadrains

• ABCB rhyme → internal rhyme

• Anaphora: “and”

• Contraries — old/young, rural/urban

• Criticism of institution

• Simple imagery that contrasts the complexities of the issues he addresses

• Imagery of shackles/net/chains

• Pastoral imagery

• Childhood innocence

• Freedom from institution

• Various Inclosure Acts (e.g. that of 1773) permitted the enclosure with fences or hedges of former common land & village greens — institution encroachment

• Swedenborgianism — sexual and religious liberation

• Rousseau

• Blake contrasts typical children’s works — no moral didacticism aimed at children

• Industrial Revolution, French Revolution

• Blake’s views on religion

“The natural harmonies in “The Ecchoing Green” are sacramental…just as meaning resides within the natural world, so the realm of eternity also resides within the human breast.”

“In the postlapsarian “Garden of Love” … nature has become a controlled object which has been transformed by religion.”