Ellen (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Newland (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Age of Innocence
Credit: Alamy Images
One fine day, though history does not record how fine, William Blake’s friend and patron, Thomas Butts, came to call on the poet and his wife Catherine in Lambeth.
He was surprised to find the couple naked in the garden, reading to one another from Paradise Lost. “Come in!” cried Blake, “it’s only Adam and Eve you know!” before putting the kettle, and presumably his trousers, on.
Blake’s own Garden of Love was a dismal place, wrecked by religion (“And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds/ And binding with briars, my joys & desires”). But he understood a great truth about gardens, which is that, as well as affording various delights to the senses, they are a realm of enchantment, allegory and outright fantasy.