Nathan Cervon
One of the most enigmatic and baffling poems in the English language is William Blake's "The Sick Rose." The poem is short enough to cite in its entirety here:
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.
The "Rose" Blake probably borrowed from Dante, several episodes of whose Divine Comedy he illustrated:
In forma dunque di candida rosa
Mi
si mostrava la milizia santa
Che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa; (Paradiso
30.1-3)
John Ciardi's translation of these lines is excellent, and I give it here:
Then, in the form of a white rose,
the host
of the sacred soldiery appeared to me,
all those whom Christ in
his own blood espoused.[1]
The Rose thus signifies not Beauty, or Love, or life's vulnerability, but the social crown of life, gallantly achieved by the blessed. Together, the saved constitute the Rose.
In Blake's conception, salvation and predestination are antithetical ideas. The Rose does not appear before us as a supernal entity, magically immune to the ravages of the "worm." The worm is the Other and serves to existentialize the Rose, that is, to bring the Rose into real and significant danger. Blake thus fulfils Dante's meaning that the Rose depicted in the Paradiso is neither a transcendental assembly nor a fully complemented one. More of the Rose still remains on earth as the Pilgrim Church.
<!--pagebreak-->Just as predestination is ruled out by Blake's poem, so is the idea of justification by faith alone, for the Rose is open to the fatal incursions of sin. In Blake's poem, sin (Satan) attacks the Rose in the figure of a fly-by-night, "invisible worm." What seems to make the Rose, or Pilgrim Church, easy prey is the fact that the worm fads the Rose on its "bed / Of crimson joy." Now it is at this point that I wish to suggest that the word crimson is essential to Blake's meaning, for the word crimson can be traced to the Sanskrit krmi (worm) and jan (to generate). Among Blake's paintings are some of a distinctly Hindu cast, and it is possible that his interest in Hinduism and his penchant for archetypal thinking did in fact result in his knowing something of the Ursprache of the Indo-European family of languages.
When the reader takes into account that the Rose is specifically described as vulnerable on its "bed / Of crimson joy," and further that crimson derives from the Sanskrit for worm and to generate, it becomes clear that the worm's "dark secret love" is not for the Rose but for the "crimson" (sinful, wormy) "bed," or betrayed paradigmatic frame, and existential coloring of that aspect of the "Rose" that was foretold and identified as "the Woman on the Scarlet Beast" in the Apocalypse:
And the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and
covered
with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand
a
golden cup full of abominations and the uncleanness of her
immorality.
(Apocalypse 17.4)
The worm is thus generated and greeted by a fifth column, as it were, and together they conspire to destroy the life of the Pilgrim Church.
The encrimsoned Rose is played off against the white rose of Dante's Paradiso. That is to say that a worldly, formal, ecclesiastical institution is contrasted with the supposed purity of early, or primitive, Christianity. Blake may or may not have had in mind the pernicious influence on the "Rose" of Renaissance humanism, but I think the explication of crimson given above does throw a new and profoundly stimulating light on the poem.
NOTES
[1] The Paradiso (New York: Mentor, 1970) 338.
