A Rose a Day No.19

This is William Blake’s  presentation of his famous poem ‘The Sick Rose’ :

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.

Against the grain of the usual  rose symbolism, Blake brings out dimensions of dangerous sexual desire. The rose embodies the erotically charged violence of nature:  ‘The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm”. The  ‘bed of crimson joy’ can be interpreted as a metaphor for a woman’s vagina being self-stimulated. Then again,  seen from a different but equally unsettling interpretative angle,  these same words may indicate  an aggressive act of penetration   by a male ‘worm’, or penis.

But perhaps  the rose  symbolizes the illicit and danger of promiscious sex, and the  ‘invisible worm’ is actually syphilis, a venereal disease which could be contracted or  congenital. In Blake’s time,   doctors couldn’t see the syphilis bacteria, which,  being a sexually transmitted disease, “flies in the night’. A common metaphor for syphilis was ‘Amor’s poisoned arrow’, thereby linking the disease to the rose via Venus’s son.  In Hamlet, Shakespeare juxtaposes the rose and disease in order to describe the calumny of Claudius usurpation of the throne and the marriage to his  mother.   Hamlet says: “Such an act/...Calls virtue a hypocrite, takes off the rose/ From the fair forehead of an innocent love / And sets a blister there” (Hamlet, 3.4.42-45).  Shakespeare also uses the metaphor of the serpent for syphilis in Hamlet, thereby linking the disease to Eve’s temptation.

Analysis has subsequently revealed that the syphilis virus, Treponema pallidum, a microscopic organism called a spirochete, really is worm-like in shape. But  in yet another reading of the same few lines, Blake might    be understood to allude to  something quite different: the inhibitions imposed by religious upbringing on young people as they start to explore their sexuality.

This is quite a heavy interpretative load for a poem of just eight lines. Blake’s poem  shows just how flexible, how polysemic,  the rose as a metaphor had become by this period.  He also reminds us that we fail to do full justice to the rose if we don’t also pursue it into the   chthonic depths, where it is sometimes employed to reveal complex  and contradictory psychosexual dimensions.