SICK ROSE

BLAKE AS A PRE-ROMANTIC POET

William Blake is a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrates and printed his own books. William Blake was a 19th century writer and artist who is regarded as a seminal figure of the Romantic Age. His writings have influenced countless writers and artists through the ages, and he has been deemed both a major poet and an original thinker.

Born in 1757 in London, England, William Blake began writing at an early age and claimed to have had his first vision, of a tree full of angels, at age 10. He studied engraving and grew to love Gothic art, which he incorporated into his own unique works. A misunderstood poet, artist and visionary throughout much of his life, Blake found admirers late in life and has been vastly influential since his death in 1827.

William Blake was born in Soho, London where he spent most of his life. The house of his parents, on the corner of Board Street and Marshall Street, was erected upon an old burial ground. His father James Blake was a successful London hosier, who was attracted by the doctrines of Emmanuel Swedenborg and deeply opposed to the court. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother, Catherine Wright Armitage; her first husband, also a hosier, has died in 1751. When she married James in 1752, she was thirty. Blake's first biographer, Frederick Tatham, wrote that Blake "despised restraints and rules, so much that his father dare not send him to school." From his early years, Blake has experienced visions of angles and ghostly monks, he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the virgin Mary, and various historical figures. Blake's parents encourage him to collect prints of the Italian masters, and his father gave him engravings and plaster casts. Gothic art and architecture influenced him, and the work of Adam Ghisi and Albert Durer.

In 1767 Blake was sent to Henry Pars' drawing school, at No.101 the strand. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire, working  for him twelve hours a day, six days a week. Only on Sundays Blake returned to his family home. After studies at royal Academy School, where he did not have much respect for Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Academy, Blake started to produce watercolours and engrave illustrations for magazines. In 1783 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener; the marriage was childless – none of Blake's siblings had children. Blake taught Catherine to draw and paint and how to use a printing press. She assisted him devoutly. Just before his death Blake drew a portrait of her, saying, "You have ever been an angel to me".

His early poems Blake wrote at the age of 12. However, being early apprenticed to a manual occupation, journalistic-social career was not open to him. His first book of poems, POETICAL, SKETCHES, appeared in 1783 and was followed by SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789).  Each copy of songs of innocence was unique and poems were never in the same order. The book was not a commercial or critical success. Blake's most famous poem, "The Tyger", was part of his songs of Experience. Typical for Blake poems were long, flowing lines and violent energy, combined with aphoristic clarity and moments of lyrics tenderness. Blake was not blinded by conventions, but approached his subjects sincerely with a mind unclouded by current opinions. On the other hand this made him also an outsider. He approved of free love, and sympathized with the actions of the French revolutionaries but the Reign of Terror sickened him. In 1790 Blake engraved THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, his principal prose work, in which he expressed his revolt against the established values of his times: "prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of Religion." Radically Blake sided with the Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost and attacked the conventional religious views in a series of images did not please his wife who once remarked: " I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise." Some of Blake's contemporaries called him a harmless lunatic.

In his old age, Blake enjoyed the admiration of the group of young artist, known as "The Ancients". One of them called him "divine Blake", who "had seen God, and had talked with angels". Moreover, he was many times helped by John Linnell, a younger artist. Blake's last years were passes in obscurity, quarrelling even with some of the circle of friends who supported him. Among Blake's later works are drawings and engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy and the 21 illustrations to the book of Job, which was completed when he was almost 70 years old. Blake never managed to get out of property, in large part due to his inability to complete with fast engravers and his expensive invention that enabled him to design illustrations and print words at the same time.

SUMMARY & ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

The poem describes a sick rose and a worm that manages to locate the rose's "bed of crimson joy." The worm destroys the rose with his "dark secret love," a not so subtle reference to some kind of destructive sexuality. The speaker, addressing a rose, informs it that it is sick. An invisible worm has stolen into its bed in a howling storm and under the cover of night. The dark secret love of this worm is destroying the rose's life.

The Sick Rose is a perfect lyrical poem. The subject matter is simply told. A rose is sick and destroyed by the evil design of a worm. By "rose" William Blake could also mean his heart, and the worm could be some thoughts he has regarding a lover that is a temptation for him. His love for this person is secret, and he has thoughts about her when he is alone in his bed at night. The fact that from what we see this love is single sided slowly kills the speaker's heart and life. As the story goes, the poem starts with an impassioned address to the rose by the poet. He is deeply mortified to see the rose sick:

                        O Rose thou art sick

                        The invisible worm

                        That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

The unseen worm, which flies in the deep darkness of the stormy night, creeps in it. The worm makes its bed in the rose. It starts to bite the rose. The flower bleeds. With every bite of the worm, drop of blood is shed. The lively rose sickens. It does not know the danger it calls in by sheltering the worm. The worm thrives destroying the rose merrily. The rose gradually loses all its purity and beauty. Finally, the sickening rose meets death:

                        Has found out thy bed

                        Of crimson joy

                        And his dark secret love

                        Does thy life destroy.

But the poem has an underlying meaning. The sick rose and the joyous worm are two opposite aspects of life. One stands for innocence and the other for experience. The former is destroyed by the latter. In broad sense, they remind us of the Fall of Men. The poet uses imagery and symbol to correlate the two layers of meaning. The poem is also marked for its sound-rhythm, fineness of feelings and brevity. The expressions like ‘invisible worm’, ‘howling storm’, ‘crimson joy’, ‘secret love’ etc. are the perfect gems of poetry. The title is also significant. The word ‘sick’ reflects the theme of the poem. The poem has a rhyming scheme of ABCB. As a whole, the poem is a typical one from the pen of Blake who keeps a mark of his poetic excellence in it.

While the rose exists as a beautiful natural object that has become infected by a worm, it also exists as a literary rose, the conventional symbol of love. The image of the worm resonates with the Biblical serpent and also suggests a phallus. Worms are quintessentially earthbound, and symbolize death and decay. The “bed” into which the worm creeps denotes both the natural flowerbed and also the lovers’ bed. The rose is sick, and the poem implies that love is sick as well. Yet the rose is unaware of its sickness. Of course, an actual rose could not know anything about its own condition, and so the emphasis falls on the allegorical suggestion that it is love that does not recognize its own ailing state.  This results partly from the insidious secrecy with which the “worm” performs its work of corruption—not only is it invisible, it enters the bed at night. This secrecy indeed constitutes part of the infection itself. The “crimson joy” of the rose connotes both sexual pleasure and shame, thus joining the two concepts in a way that Blake thought was perverted and unhealthy. The rose’s joyful attitude toward love is tainted by the aura of shame and secrecy that our culture attaches to love. 

On the other level, we can't help thinking The Sick Rose is just a bit like gratuitous sex scenes and attempts to expand the boundaries of acceptability. While Blake's poem isn't about a super hot plastic surgeon that takes home a different woman every other night, it is interested in making sex and love more public, albeit in its own way.  The worm destroys the rose with his "dark secret love." We don't usually think of love as something that destroys things, but the poem suggests that a repressed love that is "dark" and "secret" – as opposed to "light" (whatever that would be) and public – does. So while this poem doesn't go over the top with risqué nude scenes, it does at least suggest the dangerous consequences of viewing sex and love as things to be kept "dark" and "secret."

To make things clear, as a symbolic poem, The Sick Rose bears a deeper meaning. The rose stands for innocence, purity, love and beauty. The worm, on the other hand, is the symbol of experience, evil, jealousy and selfishness. The deadly bite of evil makes love sick. Innocence is destroyed by experience, beauty by jealousy. So was the case with Adam and Eve, the First Men. Their innocence and heavenly glories were spoiled by Satan’s evil devices.