The Sick Rose

Despite its apparent simplicity, “The Sick Rose” contains, in microcosm, many of the themes and ideas that dominate Blake’s work and worldview. In the larger collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake divides his poetry into two sections in an attempt, as the collection’s subtitle states, to show the “Contrary States of the Human Soul.” The first section, labeled Songs of Innocence and first published as a separate volume, encompasses ideas of purity, simplicity, harmony, and light. The poems in this section often have a limited, repetitive vocabulary and encourage straightforward readings. The second section, Songs of Experience, works in apparent opposition to the ideas associated with innocence. This section explores topics like corruption, decay, aging, adulthood, and the depravity associated with civilization. “The Sick Rose” is firmly planted among the Songs of Experience and, like many of the works of that latter section, its relatively simple form betrays its near-cosmic scope and sphere of concerns. To contain such depth within a short poem, Blake relies primarily on symbolism, allusion and the use of polyvalent diction, or words that contain multiple coexistent meanings.

“The Sick Rose” begins with the speaker addressing the titular rose, who has been made “sick” by “an invisible worm” (Lines 1-2). The word “sick,” unlike similar words such as “diseased” or “ill,” is most commonly associated with humans or non-human animals, and is rarely used in reference to plants—particularly in British English, the word is a near-synonym for nausea and can also be used as a noun to refer to vomit. This word choice, combined with the speaker’s direct address to the rose, personifies the rose (See: Literary Devices) and establishes it as an analog for certain human qualities. In particular, Blake uses the conventional symbol of the rose, which traditionally stands for pure, unadulterated love, as a vehicle to explore the ways that sexual experience often destroys and corrupts the innocent ideas of love that it normally symbolizes. By personifying the rose, and drawing on a history of analogies between flowers and female genitalia (or the rose’s “crimson joy” [Line 6]), Blake places the flower in the role of the virginal female.

The worm, by contrast, is a phallic symbol that represents, in part, male sexuality. Not only is the worm shaped like a phallus, it is explicitly referred to using male pronouns in the poem’s seventh line. The claim that the worm’s “dark secret love” destroys the flower (Line 7), further reinforces the analogy between the worm and the male phallus. Historically, the term “deflowering” refers to acts that deprive a person or thing of its virginal status, whether literally or metaphorically. The rose’s death in the poem’s final line liberalizes this turn of phrase and reaffirms the connection between the rose’s illness and its loss of innocence. The rose’s loss of innocence and resulting illness also connects it to the Garden of Eden narrative from the Book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are expelled after eating from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Both Adam and Eve and the rose are condemned after a loss of innocence, and the figure of the worm also acts as an allusion to Satan’s role John Milton’s interpretation of the Eden narrative, Paradise Lost (See: Symbols & Motifs).

In the Blake’s poem, however, the worm’s role is more forthright as an agent of experience than Satan’s. Rather than merely coaxing Eve to partake in the forbidden fruit, Blake’s worm takes an active role. The worm seeks and eventually finds the rose’s “bed” (Line 5), which refers both to a flower bed—solidifying that the poem is set in a garden, like Eden—and the conjugal bed, where couples consummate their marriage. The worm, however, is an uninvited participant in this consummation who enacts “dark secret love” unto the rose (Line 7). The worm’s “Love,” another word for the sexual act, is “dark” and “secret” because of its adulterous, hidden nature but also because the worm’s burrowing into the rose’s flower bed is presented as akin to a sexual assault.

Even without the sexual metaphor, the worm can only be understood as an invader—an agent of experience and corruption that is unwelcome in the rose’s idyllic garden. Though it is tempting to read the garden as an artificial locale curated by human hands, the poem’s clear parallels to the Eden narrative suggest, instead, that the garden is analogous to the original state of nature, prior to mankind’s fall. The worm’s invasion and corruption of the rose, then, can be read as a metaphor for the destruction and exploitation of virginal nature by humankind. This reading is troubled, however, by the insoluble disconnect between the natural worm and the less-natural, civilized forces that motivate such destruction.

While the connection between the worm and Satan might appear to resolve these internal tensions, much of Blake’s work—particularly his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—understand God and Satan as contrary but essential forces. This idea is also reflected in the claim that Songs of Innocence and of Experience aims to show the “Contrary States of the Human Soul.” It is perhaps best to think of the rose as an emblem of innocence itself and the worm as one of experience. Informed and colored by sexual discourse, “The Sick Rose” depicts the death of innocence when faced with experiences and mourns the beauty and unadulterated love that is lost through this process.