What it Means to be Sick

What is the connotation of experience in William Blake’s collection? While avoiding making a generalization about the whole collection, in the “The Sick Rose” experience is synonymous for sexual corruption. The word corruption is important here because sexual experience does not necessitate negative implications, yet in this poem sexual experience is connected to a fall from Eden. I will explore this theme first by examining the connotations of the setting, characters, and form/meter and then going on to discuss the significance of this poem’s interpretation of sexuality.

The setting of the poem is the bed of a woman who is called the Rose. The poem takes place at night in a howling storm. The night tends to imply a darkness of intention or sin and a storm is a foreboding element, which suggests the coming of harmful events. Finally, a bed is a bed is a bed. While a bed could be used for sleeping, symbolically and in other practices a bed is used for coital activity. The fact that there is more than one character in the Rose’s bed would further incriminate her “sleeping” cot.  The setting as a whole sets up a sexual atmosphere that is plagued by a sinful nature.

Two aspects of this poem that I find particularly striking are its form and meter. The poem is made up of two stanzas of four lines each. The shortness of the poem gives it an abrupt startling quality that goes well with the dark insinuations of a Blakean sexual corruption. There are rhymes in the poem, but there is only one rhyme set per quatrain, and the first rhyme is a slant rhyme. Two complete rhymes would give the poem a sense of unity and therefore purity of character, but the slant rhyme makes the poem feel morally slanted. The first rhyme is "worm" and "storm", which implicates the worm as having a sinister and stormy demeanor (Blake l2-4). The second rhyme is “joy” and “destroy,” which perhaps suggests that a certain form of joy (sexual) is destructive (Blake l6-8). Finally, the meter of the poem is strange as it is primarily a five-syllable meter, but often breaks from this rhythm. The rhythmic instability and short lines give the poem a rocky and staccato quality, which points further to a dismal and sinful poetic subject. The rhymes and meter together give the poem a negative aura.

 The characters themselves are suggestive of sexuality and sin. In “The Sick Rose” the three characters are a narrator, a “Rose,” and a worm. The narrator is watching over the Rose and details her corruption or murder by the worm. As the subject of the poem is sexual, the narrator could then be seen as voyeuristic. A Rose has variety of symbolisms: the five wounds of Christ, the Virgin Mary, blood, or love. The virginal and amorous connotations of the word Rose give the subject of the poem an innocent and yet sexualized nature, as to be virginal one is associated with having yet to experience sex. Finally, the worm is the most suggestive of the three characters. A worm is phallic and a reference to the snake in the garden of Eden. As a form of Eden’s snake, the worm is seducing the Rose into straying from innocence and out of her still pure bed. While the actual event of the poem could be a loss of virginity, the pairing of a rose with the worm turns this poem into an allegory for the Fall.

The importance of the connection that I made in this poem of sexual experience to sin is that the poem falls into a long tradition of condemning sexuality, particularly female sexuality. The Rose was I assume before this poem virginal, innocent, and metaphorically of Eden; yet, once the worm enters her bed she is “sick” (Blake l1). Women should not be condemned for exploring their sexuality nor should this be a sign of experience. If we were to take experience as an act of consciousness, I would question whether or not sexuality is even a form of consciousness. One can have sex and have little understanding of what it means to be sexual. In addition, idealizing the virginity of a woman is in a sense sexualizing her innocence. A woman is the most desirable when she is still in an infantile, physically untouched state. The virginal woman is what men want and lust after, even to an extent today. Can virginity ever then escape the “tainting” touch of sexuality?

Photo: http://pararational.com/translucent-flying-worm-prauge/