Poem Of The Week: The Sick Rose by William Blake (1757-1827)

The Sick Rose

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.

Image by Ri Butov from Pixabay

William Blake’s fine poem of corrupted innocence would be serviceable in any context or setting: crushing experience, like the malevolent worm whose trajectory seems inexorable, undermines the pristine fabric of hope in two short quatrains, laying waste utterly. Against a rich figurative canvas – the worm and the waiting rose are, respectively, velocitous and trapped – the ‘consummation’ is inevitable.

If Blake’s ire is animated by the iniquities of his age - desperate poverty, a cankerous body politic and a Church whose vision is entirely obscured by hypocrisy – it is within the prescient poet’s gift to leave suggestive marks elsewhere. And it is hard not to infer, in the creature’s seductive blandishment, and the credulous beauty of the rose, a metaphor for the rise of populism in our own time.

‘The Sick Rose’ is taken from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, published by the Oxford University Press (1984)