The Garden of Love

The Garden is the dominant image in the poem and the setting for all the events. The image evokes two gardens in the Christian Old Testament. One is the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve loved without shame and self-consciousness, innocent and uninhibited. Such is the play of the children in the speaker’s childhood. When the speaker rediscovers the garden, it is in the state similar to Eden after the Fall, with the corresponding repression and prohibition. A second garden in The Old Testament is found in the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon. In this poem, garden imagery is used as a metaphor for sexual enjoyment. Modern Christian interpretations of the poem, however, reframe the erotic as spiritual, and therefore devalue the importance of sexual expression.

The flowers in the garden are also symbolic, as a representation of nature and its beauty. They contrast strongly with the man-made chapel, the physical expression of the unnatural laws and dictates created by the Church to contain and limit human expression. There are no longer flowers to be found in the garden, as they have been replaced by tombstones and graves. No flowers seem to grow around these tombs either, implying that all that is natural and beautiful has been killed.