After “The Flea,” here is another poem about a small creature and desire. William Blake does it in only eight lines and explains almost nothing.
Blake made the poem as an illuminated page, with the words and image printed together. I started with the words alone and looked at the design after recording my first response.
The poem
Text: Representative Poetry Online
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.
Before I read anything about it
I took the poem literally on first reading, although I had a niggling feeling that it was an allusion to something. I pictured a red rose alone in a windy, rainy storm, slowly withering and dying because some insect had infected it.
Even as I thought about it, things that had seemed obvious started to raise questions. An insect being responsible for a rose withering seemed plausible, but I couldn’t think of one that would make it happen so quickly.
Looking at Blake’s illuminated page
I looked at Blake’s illuminated page at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is definitely something sexually charged about the picture. What had been only a hint in “Has found out thy bed” becomes much more evident in Blake’s artwork.
Listening to the poem
I listened to Mimi Khalvati read “The Sick Rose” for the Poetry Archive. Her slow, even reading felt very close to how I had read it myself.
There is a lot of imagery in these eight lines. If anything, the ambiguity gives me room to picture more rather than less.
What I learned
“The Sick Rose” appeared in Songs of Experience in 1794. Blake had published Songs of Innocence a few years earlier, and later brought the two together as Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The full title described them as showing “the two contrary states of the human soul.”
The words were never meant to stand alone. Blake etched the poem and its design onto a copper plate, printed copies himself and colored them by hand. The Met copy I saw was printed around 1825 from the plate he made in 1794. Other surviving copies use different colors, so there isn’t even one definitive version of the picture.
Apparently, there is no agreed key to the rose and worm. The obvious sexual reading sees the rose as a woman and the worm as a secret lover or phallic figure. Other readers have seen sexual disease, jealousy, repressed desire, guilt, corruption or simply the destruction that can exist inside love.
The literal reading doesn’t disappear either. Blake’s designs include worm-like and caterpillar-like creatures, so the thing that “flies in the night” could be suggesting the winged stage of a larva rather than an ordinary earthworm. Still, making it invisible and giving it “dark secret love” pushes it beyond a garden pest.
One detail I especially liked makes the ambiguity even stranger. An early draft said “her dark secret love” before the published poem settled on “his.” That makes it harder to assume that the worm was always meant to be one particular male intruder.
The two full rhymes almost tell the story by themselves: worm with storm, then joy with destroy. Everything else remains unresolved.
Reading it again
It is comforting to know that the sexual ambiguity I sensed while reading the poem has been noticed by others too, and may well have been deliberately intended by Blake.
What stayed with me
The poem is too short for me to pull out one particular line. The whole thing is haunting enough that I think all of it will keep coming back to me, especially the image of a lonesome rose withering in a storm.