19 pages • 38 minutes read
William BlakeThe Sick Rose
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1794A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Religious Context
All of Blake’s writings are in some way informed by his religious beliefs. Though Blake’s own take on Christianity is highly idiosyncratic and does not align with traditional doctrine, he still relies on a shared stock of imagery and narrative to inform and enrich his poetry. “The Sick Rose” leans heavily on the narrative of the expulsion of humanity from the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and understanding the poem requires basic knowledge of the role of innocence in Christian theology.
Most Christian sects view innocence as humanity’s default state—or at least its state of creation. Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, were molded from clods of clay in the Garden of Eden, a paradise on Earth. There, they were to tend to the garden’s plants and animals and maintain dominion over them but were explicitly instructed not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. In the Biblical story, a snake appears and tempts the couple to eat from the tree, which provides them with the knowledge of good and evil and corrupts the world. In John Milton’s retelling of the Fall, Paradise Lost, the snake is refigured as Satan, a fallen angel and God’s antagonist.
The narrative, in both tellings, moves humanity from innocence and naivety to knowledge and experience. Blake’s “The Sick Rose” relies on the same movement.
Literary Context
Blake has been celebrated as one of the greatest English poets since at least the 1960s. His poetry and worldview have influenced many of the Romantic poets and even more of the American counter-cultural poets of the 1960s and 70s. It is hard in this context to communicate how strange Blake’s poetry appeared to his contemporaries.
Blake wrote during a transitional period in English poetry. Born 1757, only 13 years after the death of Alexander Pope, Blake grew up in a period that saw English poetry as a dead medium. The poets of the Restoration and the first part of the 18th century, including Pope, were believed to have perfected English verse through perfect meter and the mastery of classical forms. This emphasis on classical verse forms may have contributed to Blake’s obscurity among his contemporaries, as Blake wrote in highly irregular forms that sometimes bare almost no relation to any prior English verse.
Moreover, Blake eschewed the restoration’s technical perfection in favor of a symbolism and intensity of emotion that would struggle under strict formal confines. Both of these characteristics of Blake’s poetry are on display in “The Sick Rose” and are heightened by Blake’s use of dimeter, a highly unusual meter. To many contemporary readers, however, Blake’s inability to stick to traditional forms marked him as a poor poet. Some contemporaries, including early Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, reveled in Blake’s verse. In addition to Blake’s unique forms, Blake was also among the first significant poets to engrave his works and accompany his poetry with illustrations.
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By William Blake
