William Blake: An Artist and Poet of Rebellion
I went to the Garden of Love…
Late in 1790 William and Catherine Blake crossed the River Thames to Lambeth, and an address close by Westminster Bridge, that gave them much more room in which to work: enabling him to spread out and see every aspect of the work in progress — “ I had a whole house to range in.”
As Peter Ackroyd writes:
“ №13 Hercules Buildings was a terraced house of three storeys and a basement, containing nine or ten rooms, some of them with marble fireplaces and panelled walls. For the first time in his life he possessed a garden; there was a large fenced one at the back, which contained a vine and a fig tree, and there was also a smaller one at the front — ‘a garden mild’ or even ‘the Garden of Love’, as he expressed it in the poems he was writing now.”
Blake’s poem The Garden of Love does suggest that having found a haven in Lambeth, it could so easily be taken away, as many thing had been taken or lost in the past, and could be again. They were dangerous times.
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.
