Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

It's technically not my week to post, but William Blake is by far my favorite poet so I was bummed that only one of his poems made it onto the syllabus and that we only talked about it for approximately 15 minutes.
At the very end of class we briefly talked about the fact that " The Garden of Love" appears in Blake's Songs of Experience and the recurring theme of a narrators point of view pre- and post- experience. What we didn't get to was the fact that most poems in these works have parallels. Some are more obvious, like "The Chimney Sweeper" poems, or "The Lamb" and "The Tyger." Like these poems, "The Garden of Love" is in Experience and has a parallel in Innocence, though it is not as obvious. The clue is in line 4 where Blake refers to "the green." This poems parallel is titled "The Echoing Green" within Innocence and creates a scene of childish enjoyment of the outdoors and a presumed garden. This falls in line with our discussion of how the narrator in "The Garden of Love" speaks of days past in a childish way.
This poem is a brazen critique of the way in which orthodox religion suppresses sexuality, something which Blake found to be completely natural. Within this critique, what I found most interesting is the way in which the garden represents love, purity, and rightness. This is juxtaposed with the Marvell poem we talked about which discusses gardens as a human control and manipulation. Not only does the garden represent goodness, the chapel, a physical, human construction, is the oppressive force in the narrative. What I drew from this is that in the same way the chapel is an imposing and deadly force within the poem, so orthodoxy proves to be fatal to right, and godly worship.
Besides being a poet, Blake was also an artist who created illuminated books (both Songs books being examples). As much may be gleaned from the illustrations as from the poem itself. Below are the illuminated manuscripts for both of the poems.