William Blake in contemporary context: ‘The Sick Rose’

 William Blake in contemporary context: ‘The Sick Rose’ 

William Blake

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.  

Commentary:  

This poem has to be considered in its context: as a handwritten text with integrated graphics; as  part of a larger work, the Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794); and as a commentary on,  and influenced by, London of the early 1790s, specifically the radical, working class circles that  Blake moved in during this period of his life.  

William Blake (1757-1827) was a prophetic visionary who used Biblical and other imagery in his  work. The rose only occurs twice in the Authorised version of the Bible (Isaiah 35:1 and Songs  2:1) but both texts were used by Blake in his work. Traditionally, the rose has been seen as a  female archetype, with specific sexual connotations, often linked to the Biblical story of the  temptation of Eve by the serpent, as used by Milton in Book IX of Paradise Lost, a work with  which Blake was familiar.  

In this poem William Blake portrays the Sick Rose as a female figure representing the rose of  England, the national identity, which had been blighted and corrupted by the invisible worm of  moral decay in the England of the early 1790s. In so doing he draws on both Biblical imagery  and on London's radical politics of the time, including the agitation against the intrigues and  manipulations of press freedoms by the politician and journalist George Rose (1744-1818).  

John Noyce  

Melbourne (2007)  

 

References 

William Blake, Songs of Experience: facsimile reproduction (New York: Dover Publications, 1984), plate  11 

Jon Mee, 'The "insidious poison of secret Influence": a new historical context for Blake's "The Sick  Rose"', Eighteenth-Century Life, vol.22(1), 1998, pp111-122