The_Sick_Rose

The Sick Rose Since everyone knows that William Blake was Virgina Woolf's son, it should come as no suprise that they share a postmodern sensibility. In Blake's poem, "The Sick Rose," the rose is a symbol for a tree. The worm which infects the rose symbolizes a plague of locusts that comes to kill the rose/tree. The existence of the worm/locusts is implicit in the very existence of the rose/tree, or, as Jacques Derrida might argue, the locusts deconstruct the tree. The fact that the words "sick" and "rose" both have four letters is fundamental to the meaning of the poem, for Blake was 44 years old when he wrote it. He had also been sick for some time. His biographer, Simone de Beauvoir, suggests that his parents often brought him roses during the sickness. Once a worm crawled out of one and spoke to him in a mystical language. This is why Blake says we must all create our own mythologies or have the mythologies of others thrust upon us. The church that Blake founded blake, rose, poem, worm, sick, mystical, lines, die, wrote, tree, symbol, since, roses, rose/tree, rhyme, red, often, mythologies, must, meter, meaning, locusts, letters, kill, just, four, fact, extra, existence, during, church, been, years, yard, writer, worms, worm/locusts, words, woolf's, wonderful, wind, william, virgina, very, upon, tone, time, thrust, throughout, there's