Religion in Marlowe’s 'Jew of Malta'

Whilst Marlowe was writing, anti-Semitism was rife across the entirety of Europe. The Renaissance period saw the rise of increasingly xenophobic, anti-Jewish fears somewhat comparable to the prejudice against Islam in the Western world today, fed on and augmented by President Trump. We only have to look at the work of the so-called Old Masters to see how widespread these anti-Semitic sentiments really were. Not only were Jesus and his followers stripped of their Jewish identity and transformed into anachronistically Christian figures, but also, on the rare occasion that Jews were actually depicted in Renaissance art, their portrayal was far from complimentary. Albrecht Durer’s Jesus Among the Doctors is a case in point: the Jew that stands to the right of Jesus is almost caricature-like with his grotesque grin and hooked nose. Given the pervasiveness of this anti-Semitism, it’s no wonder that Marlowe’s Barabas is likewise presented according to the bigoted values of the age. He is, in fact, a complete caricature of the selfish and cruel Jew. And yet, what’s interesting about Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta is that Jews are not the only group to receive criticism. Indeed, almost every religious group, Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, seem to be at the receiving end of Marlowe’s reproach. This can be said for the majority of Marlowe’s work, much of which is dedicated to the analysis and condemnation of religious doctrine and hypocrisy. So, with reference to Marlowe’s work and in particular The Jew of Malta, I intend to explore Marlowe’s views on religion as presented through his plays.

I must, of course, begin this essay with an analysis of the loathsome and Machiavellian character of Barabas. The prologue of the play, delivered by Niccolò Machiavelli himself, describes how Barabas ‘smiles to see how full his bags are crammed, / Which money was not got without my means.’ Immediately, then, he is presented as a typical machiavelle figure of Renaissance drama, characterised by the same scheming villainy encapsulated by Iago (Othello) and Edmund (King Lear) in Shakespeare’s plays. The words ‘my means’ refers to the philosophy set out by Machiavelli in his famous work Il Principe – a proto-self-help book preaching expediency over morality and the appearance over the reality of virtue. Barabas fills this role perfectly, almost all of his actions recalling Satan’s words in Book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘Evil be thou my Good.’ For example, he distances himself from the man with a conscience who ‘for his conscience lives in beggary.’ It is by acting without a conscience, Barabas implies, that he has acquired his huge fortune. This lack of conscience links directly to his greed and self-interestedness, obvious in the equal weight he gives to his wealth and to his daughter when he exclaims: ‘O girl! O gold!’ This levelling comparison clearly influenced Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice when he had Shylock exclaim “O my ducats, O my daughter…” Barabas’s selfishness is also evident in his asides during the conversation he has with the other Jews in Malta. He says: ‘Assure yourselves I’ll look – unto myself.’ He cares only for himself, even bringing about the murder of his daughter’s lover to get his revenge on Ferneze. But, in the words of Harry Levin, these asides also serve to show Barabas’s Machiavellian emphasis on appearance, distinguishing between ‘deeds and words.’ He hides his true intentions from the other Maltese citizens, but treats the audience as his confidantes and thus implicates us in his crimes.

Though we may have some pity for Barabas in his cruel treatment by the Maltese governor and his similarities to Job, our sympathy quickly dissipates as he develops from a simple miser to a murderous villain. As Levin points out, Barabas ‘is a man with a grievance, but his retaliation outruns the provocation.’ Though he may begin as a revenger, he very quickly turns into the villain himself. This murderousness is clear in the famous speech Barabas gives when purchasing Ithamore as a slave: ‘As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, / And kill sick people groaning under walls; / Sometimes I go about and poison wells…’ Whether these claims are true is uncertain. It’s possible that this speech is only made in order to entice Ithamore, whom Barabas seems to have already discerned as a villain who, like him, hates Christians. Perhaps, also, Marlowe was simply playing on and parodying the extreme hatred for Jews in Europe. Whatever the answer, it’s undeniable that Barabas fulfils these murderous claims – by the end of the play, he has poisoned and killed the whole of a nunnery (including his own daughter), caused the death of two friends, slaughtered numerous Turkish soldiers, and much more. As the play progresses, his hands grow more bloody and his heart blacker, becoming exactly what European society expected a Jew to be. So it’s clear that Marlowe is playing on these early modern prejudices to present us with the frightful image of a Jew who really only cares for himself and his revenge.

And yet, it’s not just Barabas who is presented as a loathsome figure – almost every character in the play, apart from Abigail, is selfish and unsympathetic. And though we may strongly dislike Barabas, we are watching ‘the tragedy of a Jew’ - Barabas is our tragic hero, and to an extent we see the play from his perspective, often taking his side against the play’s other characters. Our sympathy for Barabas is stirred when he has his wealth seized by Ferneze the governor, under threat of Christian conversion. During this scene, Barabas launches a succession of bitter attacks against Christianity, beginning with the words: ‘Will you then steal my goods? / Is theft the ground of your religion?’ Here, Barabas points out the hypocrisy of their actions, going against the commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ When Ferneze attempts to justify the cruelty of the Christians, he explains that Jews are infidels and that they ‘stand accursèd in the sight of heaven.’ This idea, that the Jews are to blame for the death of Christ (the ‘first curse’) and are therefore born sinful, was a typical trope of the period. Though the audience of the time may also have held this belief, it’s clear that Marlowe did not, or else he would not have allowed Barabas to respond in such cogent terms, appealing as he does to our sense of justice: ‘Shall I be tried by their transgressions? / The man that dealeth righteously shall live…’ Though we know that Barabas is far from righteous, we still sympathise with his argument that men should be judged according to their actions, not according to the actions of their ancestors. This can also be read as a Marlovian argument against the Calvinistic doctrine of Original Sin which held that all humans are born sinful due to Adam’s fall. And so, in this episode it is the Christians who are presented as heartless, with ‘policy’ (trickery or duplicity) as their profession, using scripture to confirm their wrongs. Arguably, it is this unjust and hypocritical treatment that leads Barabas to ‘make bar of no policy’ and adopt the same cruel attitude as the Christians have towards him.

So when Barabas says to his daughter that ‘religion / Hides many mischiefs from suspicion’ we can’t help but agree. The Christians of Malta have used their religion to justify their cruelty against the Jew, even though that cruelty goes against the New Testament credo ‘Love thy neighbour.’ Marlowe also takes care to demonstrate the vices of churchmen themselves, with Friar Jacomo and Friar Bernardine fighting over Barabas’s wealth. They care nothing for the cleansing of his soul or for his conversion – they care only for the goods he promises them. Indeed, Jacomo is so covetous of Barabas’s wealth that he stabs Bernardine, a fellow Christian. So Marlowe, here, is mocking and criticising the greed of the church and their hypocrisy. There are numerous other instances of this throughout the play. For example, when Abigail dies, she asks Friar Bernardine to ‘witness that I die a Christian’ and he simply replies: ‘Ay, and a virgin, too, that grieves me most.’ He breaks Church law when he reveals the contents of Abigail’s dying confession, and hopes to use what she has told him as blackmail. Once this scene has taken place, we can’t help but recall Ithamore’s earlier question: ‘have not the nuns fine sport with the friars now and then?’

It’s clear, then, that Christians and the Church also come under attack in this play. Indeed, the play’s conclusion reinforces Abigail’s beautiful lament that ‘there is no love on earth, / Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks.’ She’s certainly right that Ithamore (the main representative of the Turks in the play) and Barabas are wicked. Abigail’s mistake, though, is to think there is love, pity, or piety in the Maltese Christians, who reveal themselves to be just as sinful and scheming as Barabas himself. Barabas is only killed at the end of the play because he is out-manoeuvred by another schemer, Ferneze, who, despite his religion, shows no mercifulness whatsoever at the play’s conclusion. As Barabas calls out ‘Help, help me, Christians, help!’ and asks ‘Governor, why stand you all so pitiless?’ Ferneze explains that he has no pity for him at all, wishing to see his ‘treachery repaid.’ Again, this demonstrates his religious hypocrisy – as a Christian, he ought not only to forgive and show mercy, but also to see it as God’s role to ensure justice, not his own. Thus, Ferneze abandons his religious morality (which he seems never really to have had) and uses Barabas’s own tactics against him. We might conclude with Levin, then, that ‘Morally, all of them operate on the same level, and that is precisely what Marlowe is pointing out.’ Every religious group is shown to be vicious and hypocritical, and various Christian doctrines come under attack, notably the idea that ‘Faith is not to be held with heretics,’ which Barabas himself uses against the Christians.

What’s most interesting, though, is that, whilst Marlowe was simply following theatrical clichés and contemporary bigotry when he presented Barabas in such a negative light, such an attack on Christians and Christian doctrine was rarely seen on stage. Perhaps this goes some way to reveal Marlowe’s own religious views. Indeed, as Paul H. Kocher suggests, Marlowe was ‘one of the most highly subjective playwrights of his age.’ Thus, the outright criticism of Christianity in The Jew of Malta may be suggestive. Moreover, Christianity is repeatedly questioned in Marlowe’s other works, notably Dr Faustus. Though the play is set within an undoubtedly Christian framework, and though Faustus is inevitably damned for his transgressions, we cannot help sympathising and even admiring his revolt against religion. We too desire to know the answer to eschatological questions like ‘who made the world’ and we too appreciate human beauty. Thus, the beautiful speeches Faustus gives cannot help inspiring our approbation. Indeed, Faustus’s paean to Helen (‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’) is one of Marlowe’s most powerful speeches, urging us to appreciate the strength of Faustus’s emotions when he tells the spirit: ‘thou art fairer than the evening’s air.’ W.W Greg argues that, sharing Faustus’s aesthetic appreciation, we allow ourselves to sympathise with him. Moreover, the fact that Marlowe’s verse reaches its pinnacle during a description of Helen, a symbol of pagan Greece, is surely indicative of his own feelings.

We don’t have to look far to find proof of these doubtful feelings in Marlowe’s biography. As Kocher pointed out, criticism of religion (and Christianity specifically) seems to have been ‘the most absorbing interest of his life.’ The first hint that Marlowe may have had an aversion to Christianity came when, having studied at Cambridge under an Archbishop Parker scholarship, Marlowe did not take holy orders as expected. More convincing are the allegations of atheism that Marlowe received a few years after his death: Baines, Aldrich, Cholmley and others all accused Marlowe of similar crimes, largely revolving around the preaching of atheism and the jesting at religious scripture and doctrine. Marlowe, like Machiavelli of the prologue, seems to have seen religion as no more than a ‘childish toy’.

Hence, when Faustus says that ‘hell’s a fable’ we cannot help recall Baines’s statement that Marlowe ‘perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins.’ And when Tamburlaine briefly comments ‘The God that sits in heaven, if any god,’ (my italics) it’s hard not to attribute this doubt to Marlowe himself. After all, given that Marlowe never intended to write two parts to Tamburlaine’s story, it’s odd that Tamburlaine is not punished for his crimes and his blasphemous aspirations in Part 1, and it’s doubtful whether his death in Part 2 can be seen as retributive justice rather than the natural result of mortality. Despite killing thousands of innocents, no god punishes Tamburlaine, suggesting Marlowe’s doubts as to whether there is any god at all. Moreover, when Barabas jests at Christian doctrine and blasphemes against Christ (for example, by marking his hidden jewels with a cross), it cannot escape our notice that Marlowe probably made similar jests and blasphemous remarks during his own lifetime, and thus that Marlowe is, to some extent, talking through Barabas. I hope, then, that I have shown how Marlowe’s own doubts and possible atheism are demonstrated in his work. Given the corruption of the Catholic Church in the Early Modern period (Anthony Kenny described Pope Alexander VI as ‘the most villainous man ever to have occupied the Roman See’), and given the oppressive nature of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, it’s no wonder that an intellectual like Marlowe had difficulties in accepting Christianity. Like the characters he created, he struggled to see past the hypocrisy of churchmen, the contradictions in religious doctrine, and the restraints that Christianity (or indeed any religion) placed on its followers. 

Conflict in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poetry, said Yeats, is made out of a “quarrel with ourselves”. This statement seems to exemplify Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems, rife as they are with internal religious conflict. The two major conflicts or tensions in Hopkins’ verse are between aestheticism and asceticism, and between doubt and belief. The first of these tensions is due to the fact that Hopkins, as a Jesuit priest, always felt guilty for his love of beauty, creating in Hopkins what many critics call the poet-priest divide. The second is caused by the existence of suffering, which Hopkins struggles to reconcile with the idea of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. He is faced, like many other Christians, with the Problem of Evil. Perhaps these tensions explain why his style is so enigmatic: only through sprung-rhythm, neologisms, omissions, and idiosyncrasies could he reveal the struggles that wracked his soul. But Hopkins’ poetry does not simply present these two conflicts to the reader. As George M. Johnson argues, through poetry, Hopkins attempted to unify the divisive elements of his mind and to manage his “world within”. This arguably explains his use of the sonnet form: often, he presents a problem in the octave, and a solution in the sestet. So for Hopkins, poetry became a sort of literary therapy, a medium in which he attempted (not always successfully) to explain away or rationalize his various fears or doubts.

The tension between sensuousness and asceticism was a constant throughout the Victorian age. Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” shows the irony of materialism in a religious man, and Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market” demonstrates the danger of pursuing sensuous joy. But this conflict was exacerbated in Hopkins far more than in any other Victorian poet, arguably because of his upbringing: his father was allegedly autocratic, and his headmaster at Highgate was said to be a cruel tyrant. Hopkins escaped both of these authority figures, but he could never truly escape the self-accusatory spirit they had instilled in him, exemplified in his approach to beauty – he once wrote to Robert Bridges that certain kinds of beauty are “dangerous” and abandoned his wish to become a painter precisely because of this sentiment. This feeling that worldly beauty is somehow anti-religious is what led him to burn his poetry in 1868, just days after he decided to become a Jesuit. I.A. Richards is right in his assertion: “the poet in him was often oppressed and stifled by the priest”.

But seven years after the poetry-burning, Hopkins began writing once more. During the years of silence, Hopkins seems to have concluded that aestheticism and religion are not entirely incompatible. In this sense, he was particularly influenced by the thinking of Duns Scotus, whose concept of ‘haecceitas’ or ‘thisness’ is very similar to Hopkins’ theory of ‘inscape’ – “the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing” (W.A.M. Peters). Scotus’ theories helped Hopkins to make his own sensuality more acceptable to himself and to link the world’s beauty with God, as in poems like “God’s Grandeur” – “The world is charged with the grandeur of God…” His poems seem to draw on various religious ideas, including the teleological (or design) argument and the concept of panentheism, most clear in Sonnet 57 where Hopkins writes: “Christ plays in ten thousand places…” Through these ideas, that beauty is representative of God’s skill and that God is in all of the world, Hopkins reconciled his love of the sumptuous world with his strict adherence to religious customs.

But these arguments by no means solve the tensions. Perhaps, to an extent, Hopkins’ poetry was simply a literary enactment of self-deception in which he wrote what he wanted to believe. Frederick Page argues along these lines, suggesting that Hopkins felt uneasy about his love of beauty and felt the “imperious necessity of connecting it with God…” Although Hopkins wrote poems like “Pied Beauty” in which he praises God for ‘fathering forth’ a variety of beauty, he also wrote “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”. The poem begins with a description of the “stupendous / Evening” with its “fond yellow hornlight”, but later Hopkins says: “… let life wind / Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon, áll on twó spools”. These “twó spools” are “black, white” or “right, wrong”, and he warns us to “mind / But thése two…” Rather than beauty in nature, we could infer that he wants morality. So here the “counter, original, spare, strange” is replaced by the asceticism of simple monochrome, “black, white”.

We may also find a similar conclusion in his most famous poem, “The Windhover”, in which he describes the “mastery” of a kestrel’s flight. At the start of the sestet, the speaker says: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!” This word “Buckle” is the ambiguous crux of the poem. We do not know exactly what the word should be taken to mean, but if, as Robert Rehder argues, we take the word to be an imperative meaning ‘submit’, then Hopkins could be seen as rejecting the world’s outward beauty. When the bird does submit, the fire of God will be “a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous…” If the bird (possibly a metaphor for Hopkins) buckles under God’s authority, its “brute beauty” becomes divine beauty. Of course, there are other interpretations, but this reading is succinct with the aesthetic-ascetic tension we see in Hopkins’ letters, and it also answers the question of the two comparatives, “lovelier, more dangerous” – the change will come in rejecting superficialities and embracing spiritualties. And so, we can see that, despite adopting Scotist thought, and despite attempting to rationalise his inner conflicts through poetry, his anxieties about sensuousness never truly disappeared.

The other major tension in Hopkins’ work is that of doubt and belief and the attempt to understand suffering. This conflict is most evident in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, in which Hopkins tries not only to understand the suffering of those on the ship, but also to come to terms with his own suffering during his conversion. He compares himself to “soft sift / In an hourglass,” with God (the hourglass) sifting and testing him. The suffering we experience, he argues, can either bring “the best or worst” out of us. Like with a sloe that bursts “sour or sweet” in our mouths, we can either submit to God in the face of suffering, or we can reject him. God must “Wring thy rebel… / Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm,” and so encourage sinners to beg for salvation. Hence, he is “lightning and love,” both authority and mercy, and it is through his authority that we come to find his mercy – we are like metal on an anvil to be shaped to “thy will”. This blacksmith imagery recalls Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” which begins with the emphatic words “Batter my heart…” as Donne begs God to save him, through his mastery, from the devil.

In this way, “The Deutschland” is a theodicy in which Hopkins explains suffering as teleologically good – we suffer in order to find God. Hopkins clarifies the nun’s cry in the same way: though God did not rescue her, by her cry and by her belief in Christ’s agency, she “reincarnated Christ afresh, brought his real presence, alive, into the scene of the shipwreck.” (Helen Vendler) And so, because of Christ’s presence, the others who drowned on the Deutschland are “not uncomforted” – the nun’s cry brought “the poor sheep back” and the shipwreck became “a harvest” of souls for God. The shipwreck brought faith to the faithless, a theodicy which justifies the deaths of those on the ship. At the end, Hopkins hopes that the same faith will be instilled in the people of England and “be a dayspring to the dimness of us”. The same can be said for some of Hopkins’ other poems. In “Felix Randal”, Hopkins grieves at the death of his parishioner – “O is he dead then?” But again he explains this suffering with another theodicy, arguing that “seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears” and that through his sickness, Randal went from his “boisterous years” to a man with “a heavenlier heart”. Again, Hopkins argues that suffering led Randal to God, and so we see that many of his poems are an exercise in rationalising pain.

However, Hopkins shows more doubt in “The Loss of the Eurydice”, which begins: “The Eurydice – it concerned thee, O Lord…” (the rhyme of Eurydi-ce and thee emphasising God’s culpability). Hopkins cannot understand why God would let three hundred brave men die – “I need to deplore it.” He struggles to find an explanation, and he grieves that these men were not Catholics, though good men. The only hope he proposes is that suffering leads men to drive “full for righteousness”, and he implores the people of England to pray that those on the ship may be granted “pity eternal”. This doubtfulness recurs in the ‘Terrible’ sonnets, poems written in a time of deep distress, when his state was “much like madness.” Vincent Turner says this distress was due to “the sight of physical and moral evil” in the world, and most importantly, the suffering Hopkins himself experienced. In “Carrion Comfort” Hopkins questions why God would “rude on” him his “wring-world right foot rock” and “lay a lionlimb” against him. But he justifies this with another theodicy, employing the metaphor of harvest. He is buffeted like corn in the wind so that his “chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.” Suffering is necessary for the harvest, and this again recalls the imagery of “The Deutschland”.

But Hopkins is not always so successful in explaining away his pain. In “To seem the stranger” he laments that “dark heaven’s baffling ban / Bars” his words and so, without his poetry and his ability to rationalise his suffering, he is left “a lonely began”. In “I wake and feel the fell of dark” he reaches a similar stalemate, the only comfort being that “The lost are like this… but worse.” He, at least, believes in God, even though his cries are “like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.” Here, as before, we see that Hopkins could never completely overcome these conflicts. Johnson argues that “By hammering out his emotions… into the sonnet form, Hopkins can manage to a degree the cries which well up from within.” But the doubts were always present in him, and poetry often failed to aid him. Though he tried to understand what Jennings calls “the ennobling power of suffering”, he could never really reconcile himself to “the blight man was born for” (“Spring and Fall”).

To an extent, then, Hopkins was rather like T.S. Eliot, though the comparison seems unusual. In The Waste Land, Eliot searches for hope in this “stony rubbish”, and he finds that hope in “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” And yet, because of all that has come before, Eliot’s romantic conviction that a better world is possible if we ‘give, sympathise, control’ seems somewhat forced. Certainly this is what Eliot hopes: but does he believe it could happen? Perhaps we can say the same about Hopkins’ rationalisations and theodicies: he wants to believe that aestheticism can be reconciled with religion, and he wants to believe that suffering is part of God’s plan. Whether he really believes his arguments, though, is uncertain, and this uncertainty is augmented by the fact that, in poems like “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves” and “To seem the stranger”, he can find no justification for sensuous delight and he can find no explanation of his suffering. And so it’s clear that, throughout his life, Hopkins was haunted by these tensions, and he tried to resolve them through poetry. J Hillis Miller argues that poetry must “make something happen.” Hopkins’ poetry often tried to make something happen, namely the conclusion of his inner conflicts. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes he failed. But he is no less a poet for that. 

"The Garden of Love" - A Brief Analysis of Blake's Poem

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 turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

I can’t quite put my finger on what makes this poem so wonderful. My grandmother, a rebelling ex-Catholic, used to read it to my mother when she was a child, and my mother subsequently read it to me as I was growing up. I suppose that’s why this poem has stuck with me for such a long time – I have a personal connection to it. Hopefully, though, I can try to explain my affection for it in more objective terms.

Clearly, the poem is about Blake’s struggles with religion, particularly the stringent rules of the orthodox Anglican Church. But it’s also about the change he himself has gone through in his movement from “innocence” to “experience” as expressed in the titles of his books (Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience).

Hence, with experience, he sees what he “never had seen” – the harsh rigidity of church authority. Where previously he could “play on the green” (recalling the themes of innocent freedom in his earlier poem “The Echoing Green”), there is now a threatening Chapel with shut gates and with “Thou shalt not, writ over the door…”

Likewise, graves and tombstones now stand “where flowers should be.” In Blake’s mind, the church has destroyed everything good in the world – the freedom of childhood, the freshness of the natural world, and, inevitably, the beauty of love. These are things he could enjoy in his childhood innocence, but now that he has matured, his freedom has been torn from him.

There’s a strong sense of nostalgia that lingers throughout the poem, mostly because of the contrasts between the present and the past – the chapel contrasted with green grass, and graves contrasted with flowers. But this nostalgia is also created, perhaps, by the buoyant anapestic trimiter (“A Chapel was built in the midst,” – “Du-dum du-du-dum du-du-dum”). This metre shares the rapid and somewhat cheerful sound of the dactyl, perhaps signifying Blake’s attempts to recall his past innocence and exuberance.

And yet, the rhyme scheme may imply that Blake’s yearning for his past will never be fulfilled, just as the rhyme scheme is never fully fulfilled: only two lines per stanza rhyme, and the rhyme scheme collapses completely in the final stanza. Likewise, the metre changes in the last two lines, moving to an anapestic tetrameter. This symbolizes two things: the failure to recall past innocence (reflected in the return to a slower, less lighthearted metre), and the change that has taken place in the Garden itself. It’s this metrical variation in the poem that I find so exciting.

Thus, the green of the garden has been replaced by the “black gowns” of the priests. Here we recall Blake’s words in his poem “London” where he says that “Every blackening church appals” (my italics). In his mind, the Church brings decay and sadness to all that we should champion. Therefore, the priests are seen “binding with briars” Blake’s “joys and desires”.

So, in his experience, Blake realizes the austere control placed on people by the Church and, as a non-conformist, he rallies against this. Blake may also be attacking a new chapel that was built in Lambeth near his home at the time. It was built by subscription, meaning that parishioners paid for their pews, and Blake was appalled by this. Like Chaucer, he hated the idea that those who could not pay would be excluded from eternal life with God – “the gates of this Chapel were shut”.

Blake takes arms against the authoritarian nature of the Church and the fact that it consumes all goodness in the world. Although he was technically a Christian, he hated the Church for its attempts to suppress sexuality and desire, both of which he saw as central to the human condition. So, in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” he writes: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

“The Garden of Love” is, in many ways, representative of Blake’s rebellious spirit, evident in both his mythological artwork and his more avant-garde poetry. I suppose that is really what I love about this poem, and I guess that’s why it was adored by my mother and my grandmother before her. Blake, as a Romantic poet, was ahead of his time, forever a champion of equality and freedom. For that, at least, he should be remembered.