Thursday, February 7, 2008
William Blake "The Sick Rose"
I enjoyed Blake's poem and its illustration of the destruction of beauty. Transcendentalists often use the contrasts of death and life as well as the ugly and the beautiful to illustrate that one cannot exist without the other. Blake's uses this same logic with the analogy of the "worm" and the "rose." The "worm" is clearly analogous as Blake give it traits no true worm has "The invisible worm/ That flies in the night" Though Blake uses the word "he" in the second stanza to describe the "worm" it seems as though this word applies to a deceitful person not a worm. The rose too is uncovered to be a person when Blake uses "thy" to refer to what the "worm" kills.
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I'm rather confused about the use of the worm as a metaphor for the sickness "that flies in the night". Worms are known for enriching and aerating earth, which makes it a strange example for something that in this poem is only seen as a killer of what the subject of the poem loves. I wonder if the rose is a symbol for the love between the subject and a woman, and another man (who is the worm) steals her, thereby killing the "rose" but at the same time creating a new love between the new man and the woman. I may be looking too far into his word choice, however.
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