Thought Piece: Rhetorical Analysis (The Sick Rose)

Oh my, “The Sick Rose,” by William Blake.  I remember it well:  “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.”

I remember it because I was dumbfounded that eight lines of four words each could hold a thousand more between the lines.  My high school English teacher wanted this to be the first poem we read so that we could see just how intricate the English language could be.  When asked to explain what I thought it meant, I thought perhaps it was about a relationship that was going through a rough time (the storm) since the girl (the rose) had been in an affair with someone else (the worm), therefore ruining the relationship.  To think it would be that easy...of course, thanks to my teacher, I know better now.

Apparently, what the short poem was trying to convey was the futility of love.  The rose is symbolic of love, and the worm is serpentine, therefore representing evil (in the biblical sense).  The stormy night sets the mood for chaotic evil as the worm invades the flower bed (now taking on the connotation of rape), resulting in crimson joy; pleasure tainted in shame.  Love, being a rose, is not cognizant of its corruption which depicts love as unhealthy and perverted, referencing the stupidity of human emotions.  This is only the surface.  We delved deeper behind the text to find out more.  We looked at the date, the author, and the current events of the time to create a portal through the paper and back into time, realizing that the author was very focused on changing the order of society along with mindsets of men, especially during the Industrial Revolution during which he wrote Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. “The Sick Rose” comes from this set of literature which is allegorical to the “innocent” thoughts and predispositions of human aspects like love, nature, religion, and growing up; all of it is juxtaposed by the hurtful “experience” of tainted love, merciless nature, tyrannical religion, and scarred childhoods.  Blake was basically warning his audience of the societal mindset and life; he does it all with only a few lines of very carefully chosen words.   In my opinion, rhetorical analysis can be very exciting, especially when looking at interesting literature like those of Blake’s.