As an English major, it is always interesting to study at the University level those poems and novels which you read for the first time in high school, many of which made you want to major in literature in the first place. At my high school, especially junior and senior year, I was the "English kid". I don't think I was or am an especially gifted scholar, but I loved reading and always went above and beyond in my papers. I remember in my senior year AP English class writing a response to Blake's "The Sick Rose". It ended up being nine pages long, seven pages longer than the requirement. It was thorough if anything. I went line by line, word by word almost, discussing every possible meaning of every element of the poem. I have no idea if I was anywhere near the mark. My teacher was blown away, thinking I had basically solved the poem and, as no one was around to pop my ever inflating English ego, I thought I had too.
College has a way of humbling you. I remember realizing, the first day of my reading poetry class with John Biguenet, that I was in the presence of an incredible professor who knew a hell of a lot more about literature than I did. I would be wise to shut up and listen. This has been my approach to studying literature ever since and, two and a half years later, I am relooking a "The Sick Rose" with this humility in mind. I am going to briefly discuss the poem and my ideas about it, but I'm going to end with more questions than conclusions.
I remember the central thesis of my nine page response was that the poem was about prostitution. Rereading, I am still pretty certain that it is. Blake wrote about the social ills of London in his day and prostitution was definitely on that last. The sickness of the rose is some sort of venerial disease brought about by the worm who is a client of the prostitute. The invisibility of that worm "That flies in the night / In the howling storm" (3-4) represents his anoyomity as a client, probably a rich and respectable gentleman by day, who seeks the "bed" (5) of a prostitute in the midst of all the social evils of London nightlife. The bed of crimson joy is obviously a description of a rose and its pedals, but also is a metaphor for the feminity of the prostitute. Her life is destroyed by her degrading work as a prostitute, most especially in her having to risk contracting horrible diseases to eek out a living. But I could be wrong.
The biggest complication I see in my interpretation of this poem is that, in light of what I've learned in this class so far, the worm is a more complex character than I previously thought. Worms instinctively conjure up images of death and decay, but Blake and the romantics understand the creative, life giving functions of the worms as well. As far as the poisoning of a rose or a prostitute might be life giving, I can't imagine it. And so I am asking for insights. Am I totally off base in the prostitution interpretation? Or does Blake see social evils such as prostitution bringing forth good in a harmony of opposites? Contradictions and cycles of good and evil, life and death are what the Romantics are all about after all. And worms can't fly, can they? Anyway, I'm asking for help on this one.
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Calvin,
ReplyDeleteI think that your blog is wonderful. It’s nice to see someone bring up a poem that we haven’t read in class, especially on as awesome as “The Sick Rose.” Also, I don’t think that your original thesis about prostitution is in any way off the mark—you back it up with evidence and analysis, explaining why the rose might represent this, and if so, then the worm might represent something else. With your direction, I’d say that you hit the nail on the head.
I do, however, wonder why you (and others, for the record) think of the worm and the rose in terms of symbols for something else (usually, something human). Although this form of interpretation works well, I think that we are perfectly fine thinking of the rose as a rose and the worm as a worm and then working from there.
In the opening line, “O Rose thou art sick,” the narrator addresses a rose that is sick in the sense that it is dying. I think it’s interesting to point out that the rose, unlike the narrator, is not cognizant of its impending death, at least not in the way that the ostensibly human narrator is. This reminds me of Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring,” a poem in which the narrator feels “sad thoughts” because he is capable of feeling them, while the nature around him (like a rose) cannot.
Lines 2-3, “The invisible worm/That flies in the night,” can create a few complications over interpretation. At the very least, I think we can assume that the thing flying “in the night” is a butterfly or moth (as a friend informs me, the two are almost indistinguishable), planting the larval seeds for caterpillars. You might say, “Woah, Keaton, caterpillars—where did those come from?” But one just needs to look at the engraving for the poem. It’s clear that a caterpillar is inching its way along the rose, probably eating it. Caterpillars are voracious eaters, and famous for the nuisances that they cause in agriculture—it’s only natural that the caterpillar would eat something like a rose to survive.
The complication of lines 2-3 exists, I think, in the worm’s quality of invisibility. Worms do exists within things—we usually don’t see them, too—and it’s likely that one exists within the dying rose. However, at the bottom of the engraving, a worm can clearly be seen emerging from the rosebud, an ironic visual contrast to the textual description of the poem. This is where I invite the assistance of others—cough, cough, Janelle—to add to this discussion of irony. I feel safe in saying that through the death of the rose the worm emerges nourished, and can contribute to nature by laying the seeds for the next cycle of nature.
Notice where the worm emerges, too. It is heading in the direction of the rose’s base—might we assume that the dying rose of the first generation becomes wormfood, and the worm, after emerging, then conditions the soil around him, paving the way for the next generation of nature, like a rose? In other words, we have to view the engraving as a cyclical thing, a depiction of the natural cycle of the world (a circular image can clearly be seen).
My mention of wormfood recalls “The Book of Thel” and leads me to my final point. As we learned in “Thel,” dying is the most important job that we can serve in life. It is difficult to wrap our brains and emotions around that knowledge, but that’s exactly the thing: our brains and emotions portray death as a sad thing, when death is just a thing, an act, something that we all submit to at one point or another. My point is, the death of the rose is not something to grieve over—it’s just something that happens. If we didn’t possess human brains and emotions, then we probably wouldn’t grieve at all. Once we can get over this hurdle, we see that the rose is in fact serving its most important job—giving back to nature through death. To lay out the progression:
Rose dies->putrefaction->soil->more roses
The death of the rose is natural. It happens; it is.
It’s important to remember that the “The Sick Rose” is in Songs of Experience. According to Blake, experience isn’t a bad thing; it’s a necessary thing, like death. And we are trapped in these processes of life, no matter how hard we try to escape them—an fact that is unfortunate only insomuch as we are human.
ReplyDeleteKeaton,
ReplyDeleteImpressive dude! You are right overall, I think. I am coming to see the process of the rose's death as the first level meaning of the poem and that my prostitution interpretation might be a good second level application of the primary meaning to the sad social realities of Blake's day and age. I wonder though, why Blake has so much pathos for the sick rose. Perhaps, even though death is necessary and good, the sadness we experience alongside it is also necessary and also good. Sadness at the death of loved ones and fear, anger and sorrow in facing our own mortality is a pretty human experience, don't you think?
Calvin,
ReplyDeleteI agree, and I'm sure Blake would, that the sadness we experience alongside death is a necessary and good thing---a natural thing, in fact---but, in regards to another of your points, does Blake "really" have pathos for 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.
If we re-read the poem, there is no suggestion that Blake pities the rose in any way. Instead, I think that he, as the poet, is simply relaying an image to the readers.
Although I could be wrong about this, I've come to view "The Sick Rose" possibly as an ekphrastic poem. I know that the rose isn't "technically" a visual work of art, yet it's still art---Nature's producing it. And I see Blake capturing this moment in both the poem and the etching. In fact, now that I think about it, perhaps Blake's etching confers more plausibility to my argument for "The Sick Rose" being an ekphrastic poem.
Anyways, just some late thoughts. Not sure if you, or anyone for that matter, will read them.