The Sick Rose

Blake’s use of the discourse surrounding sexual exploitation and female virginity to describe the rose’s encounter with the worm assumes that the rose’s original state was a virginal state of innocence. While the discourse around female virginity, in particular, holds less cultural weight in the western consciousness than it did in Blake’s time, it is nevertheless an important component of “The Sick Rose.” Blake uses language of sexual experience and loss of sexual innocence, in the poem, as a metonym for loss of innocence more generally. The connection between the “invisible worm” and the flower’s garden “bed” in Blake’s poem and the Genesis narrative of humanity’s fall from the innocence of the Garden of Eden points directly to Blake’s intention to talk about innocence more generally (Lines 2, 5).

The way Blake characterizes the rose’s loss of innocence is particularly noteworthy. The rose is not only made “sick” through its experience with the worm (Line 1), it is destroyed (Line 8). Blake suggests that the road from a state of innocence to one of experience is traumatic, perhaps traumatic enough to kill relatively fragile objects.