. In this instance, priests, who deny love through adopting the vow of celibacy, do not even allow the persona the opportunity to explore love, as they have taken over the only environment that has symbolized positivity. The priests, dressed in cloaks the color of death, fulfill their duties to the church by walking their rounds. They strangle the love and joy of a person, allowing the piercing thorns of briars to overgrow(Blake 52). Even in seeking out a priest for advice on love, how could the priest possibly give valuable and true advice? He is limited by his own feelings of duty towards rules set by an institution and not by himself. Celibacy is not a natural act of the human body, as love is, but something entirely foreign and centered in the mind. The religious institution follows a series of laws and motions that love does not. In The Garden of Love, the church expects the natural act and emotion of love to follow these motions, which is entirely unnatural, just as it is unnatural to be celibate and deny emotion for another human being. The result is no less cruel-the banishment of daylight love for nighttime deceit, the repression and perversion of the young into the gray and palsied sufferings of the old(Hagstrum 531). The negative and confining nature of the Church and celibacy prevent the young, positive nature of love from existing and exploring. The Garden of Love is a true testament to how easily negative energy and negative surroundings can wound and infect a positive environment. Negativity spreads like a disease, disrupting the easy and natural optimistic heart. Blake conveys this point with the convenient use of a confining institution such as the Church, which he further supports with a fine use of imagery and an effective incomplete rhyme scheme and voice. He quite easily showed that the negativity others accept through their life experiences end up robbing others of their innocence, as they choose not t...
