The poem, The Garden of Love, inspired me for its form, its prose and its color plate.  I saw things in threes; the three stanzas, which were clearly separated by the vines from the garden plus a coda if you will; the triple meter inherent in the poetry; and the illustration of three figures kneeling and praying before an open grave. And so the idea of a waltz form came to mind. Well, what I learned was that at about the same time of the creation of this poem’s color plate the waltz dance form was coming into fashion in England.  The waltz was initially criticized because it allowed couples to dance in ‘box form’ so closely to one another. In fact, the Oxford Dictionary described the waltz as “riotous and indecent!”

         Since Blake, especially in the Garden of Love, was criticizing organized religion and its hold on his joys and his desires, I thought that it might be interesting to place these two ‘criticisms’ side by side.

         What transpired was a piece which moves from in the first stanza describing melodically a beautiful, serene, good memory from Blake’s past, to an anguishing thought about the present and how it has intermingled with his past, and then, in the third stanza, to a tense, closed more dissonant harsh reality about the present, about this virus which has disrupted Blake’s Garden of Love, to a coda which describes, unfortunately the impact of this present reality on his fond memories, his joys, his desires.