Kimberly Welch on "The Sick Rose" by William Blake

William Blake's poem "The Sick Rose" is short, concise, and pleasing to the ear. It has a certain lyrical lit, which makes it naturally pleasant to read, and contains just enough content to savor and chew upon. Firstly, one can take note of the structure of the poem. It is two stanzas of four lines, each following an abcb rhyme scheme. The reader is naturally lead to ask why the author chose to use this format. To answer this question I needs look to the content of the poem. Upon inspecting the title, and reading through rapidly, one may assume that Blake is meditating on the death of a rose brought on by a worm that is devouring it, and thereby killing it; however, upon closer inspection, the poem seems not so much about a thing as it could be about a person. Firstly, the word rose is capitalized in the first line, indicating it's a proper noun, and thereby a person. So we know by the first line that it is a person by the name of Rose who is sick. The second line is an allegory coinciding with the idea of an infected flower. So what could make Rose sick that could be compared to a worm? The two other words, 'night' and 'howling', along with 'worm' invoke a sexual bent, which is supported by the next stanzas reference to a bed and 'crimson joy'. Crimson is the color of passion, which is also associated with roses. It is generally thought that one gives red or 'crimson' roses to a lover. The fist line of the final couplet summarizes what we have already gathered from the earlier lines, that it is a man who comes secretly in the night for sexual romances. And it is this 'worm' of a human being who had infected this woman, Rose, with a deadly disease. Blake's poem seems darkly satirical now, this lover who should be giving his beloved lovely red roses has instead given her sickness and death; the gift of physical love has been perverted. The paradox of the poem reveals itself in the rhyme of 'joy' and 'destroy' in the final stanza. Back to the structure of the poem, one can now surmise that the poem is divided into the description of the man who is responsible for this crime, the first stanza, followed by a description of this man's actions, the second stanza. This theme of the horrors and pain of sexually transmitted diseases seems to be a theme in William Blake's poems, as it is the final horror found in the poem "London", and is perhaps indicative of a personal or public struggle with maladies of this kind.