Driven out, and compelled to the chaste
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
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore
And I saw it was filled with graves
And tombstones where flowers should be
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
And binding with briars my joys and desires
Blake applies this negative and repressive teaching to himself. Believing as he did in free love, he feels his natural, loving ‘joys and desires’ — in other words his sexual drives — are restricted and suppressed. The ‘binding with briars’ is a metaphor for the distorted teaching of the Church, which generates pain rather than a sense of God’s love. It is also an obvious reference to Jesus’s crown of thorns, and therefore symbolises pain and humiliation. 
 Note that, like the previous line, Blake uses internal  assonant  rhyme in ‘briars’ and ‘desires’. To conclude the poem he abandons the rhyming structure to introduce a different and inventive construction that draws the attention of the reader. 

The Garden of Love