“The Garden of Love” by William Blake was first published in the second book of Blake's famous work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The first book in this series, Songs of Innocence, deals with simplistic themes and a benevolent God. In The Songs of Experience of 1794, however, Blake portrays the other, darker side of the human soul and a tyrannical God of repression. Blake's use of vivid imagery and contradiction in "The Garden of Love" is intriguing especially when considering the historical and biographical contexts in which the work was composed. Many Romantic works come from both the individual perceptions of the poet and the social consciousness of that era. . “The Garden of Love” is no exception. This poem functions to brutally satirize both the oppression of the Church, which had a social impact, and the urbanization of Lambeth, which had a personal impact on Blake's life. As Blake is known to do, he uses contrast to make the decay of his world apparent to the reader. This contrast is visible when the image of a life-giving garden decays into an image of death. This parallels events in Blake's life, when his rural home was swallowed up by urban sprawl. This particular poem was written in 1793, shortly after Blake and his wife moved from London to a house in an area known as Lambeth. Marsh on the River Thames. This new house was surrounded by a large garden and was located in a relatively new development known as Hercules Buildings. Blake and his wife had moved to Lambeth perhaps because of its rural appearance, and Blake considered it his Garden of Eden (Ackroyd 128). In “The Garden of Lo……at the center of the card……lying in the shadow of the Church. “The Garden of Love” tells Blake's corner of a society that he thinks is going in the wrong direction. By exhibiting how he has been personally affected by the oppressive nature of the Church, Blake represents the loss of freedom in a society that he believes is becoming shackled. Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. New York: Ballantine, 1995. Blake, William. “The garden of love”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature.Vol. 2. Ed. MH Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 2000. 56. Reinhart, Charles. “William Blake (1757-1827).” Dictionary of Literary Biography 93: British Romantic Poets, 1789-1832. Ed. John Greenfield. New York: Gale, 1990. 14-56.Schorer, Mark. William Blake: The Politics of Vision. New York: Vintage, 1959.