Today’s Poem: The Sick Rose

William Blake’s intimations of mortality

Vincent van Gogh, Nature morte dit roses et anemones, 1889 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Sick Rose

by William Blake

O Rose thou art sick. 
The invisible worm, 
That flies in the night 
In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed 
Of crimson joy: 
And his dark secret love 
Does thy life destroy.

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It’s easy to suppose that William Blake (1757–1827) is talking about sex in his 1794 poem, “The Sick Rose.” Given that we have a poem with howling, bed, crimson joy, and dark secret love in it, how could the interpretation not suggest itself?

The most sophisticated version of this interpretation is that “The Sick Rose” addresses the loss of innocence that comes with the awakening, perhaps masturbatory, of sexual desire in a girl. The least satisfying interpretation comes from the camp of “all people we admire in the past must really have believed exactly what we right-thinking people do now” — and so a little searching will find the view that the poem expresses Blake’s sex-positive condemnation of the Church: The teachings of Christian sexual morality are the worm that has made the rose sick.

Appearing on an illustrated page in Blake’s manuscript, the poem is two quatrains, rhymed abcb, and essentially dimeter, with two stresses in each line of irregular feet — although, read aloud, line five (Has found out thy bed)  and possibly lines seven and eight (And his dark secret love and Does thy life destroy) would probably be given three stresses, as in this dramatic reading by the actor Ralph Richardson (1902–1983).

The view that the poem has something to do with sex is probably right, but it also may be that the poem has to do with more than sex. Consider the 1934 poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” by Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) — another poem with a flower and a worm. Since it’s still in copyright, we cannot print Thomas’s poem here in Poems Ancient and Modern, but you can read a licensed copy online and listen to a dramatic reading by another actor, Richard Burton (1925–1984).

While there are hints of sexuality in the Thomas poem, the burden is that time itself is the “destroyer,” the “wintry fever,” the wind in a “shroud sail.” The force that through the green fuse drives the flower is life, the motion of the world, which builds to death. With the irony of a poet asserting in each of the stanzas’ last line that “I am dumb to tell,” the poem concludes with the couplet: “And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb / How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.”

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1795), p. 48 (Wikimedia Commons)

With that hint, we might look back at Blake’s “The Sick Rose” to see a grander and even more serious force than sex — a force of which sexual desire is only one eddy. Time as growth, change, and life: This is the “invisible worm,” the destroyer that flies in the storm to wreck the flower in its bloom. The quick march of death is what brings the blossom and then makes it wither. The rose is sick because it flowers in time and fails in that same time.

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