theme of the poem the garden of love
The Garden of Love (poem) One reading on "The Garden of Love" is that it was written to express Blake's beliefs on the naturalness of sexuality and how organised religion, particularly the Christian church of Blake's time, encouraged repression of natural desires.
Sonnet 130 "This sonnet plays with poetic conventions in which, for example, the mistress's eyes are compared with the sun, her lips with coral, and her cheeks with roses. His mistress, says the poet, is nothing like this conventional image, but is as lovely as any woman".[4] Here, Barbara Mowat offers her opinion of the meaning behind Sonnet 130; this work breaks the mold to which Sonnets had come to conform. Shakespeare composed a sonnet which seems to parody a great many sonnets of the time. Poets like Thomas Watson, Michael Drayton, and Barnabe Barnes were all part of this sonnet craze and each wrote sonnets proclaiming love for an almost unimaginable figure;[5] Patrick Crutwell posits that Sonnet 130 could actually be a satire of the Thomas Watson poem "Passionate Century of Love", pointing out that the Watson poem contains all but one of the platitudes that Shakespeare is making fun of in Sonnet 130.[6] However, E.G. Rogers points out the similarities between Watson's "Passionate Century of Love," Sonnet 130, and Richard Linche's Poem collection entitled "Diella."[7] There is a great deal of similarity between sections of the Diella poem collection and Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130", for example in "130" we see, "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head," where in "Diella" we see "Her hayre exceeds fold forced in the smallest wire."[8] Each work uses a comparison of hairs to wires; while in modern sense this may seem unflattering, one could argue that Linche's work draws upon the beauty of weaving gold and that Shakespeare mocks this with harsh comparison. This, along with other similarities in textual content, lead, as E.G. Rogers points out, the critic to believe that Diella may have been the source of inspiration for both homage, by Watson's "Passionate Century of Love," and satire by Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130." The idea of Satire is further enforced by final couplet of "130" in which the speaker delivers his most expositional line: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare, as any she belied with false compare." This line projects the message behind this work, demeaning the false comparisons made by many poets of the time.[9]