Bridging between the neoclassical eras with the ever electrifying Romantic
Period, William Blake did indeed a gigantic task of breaking away with the
poetic rules & dictions that the poems were chained in. He ushered in the
Romantic Movement applying imagination imbued with simplicity. But to what
extent his works remain simple?
The Sick Rose, often considered, the most beautiful poem written by Blake,
is constructed on an 8 line structure initiated with a simple line:
"O Rose, thou art sick."
We get the very first jolt having identified rose, the symbol of love,
beauty etc. with ‘sick’ standing antagonistic to it. The word, rose undeniably
has got an un-parallel appeal to our mind to have us all feel like singing in
the tune of Robert Burns:
"My love is like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June:
My love is like the melody,
That’s sweetly played in tune."
But as we approach the last word, sick, another window opens up to look over
a sick society where April turns out to be ‘the cruelest month’, ‘where
invading army clashes over night’, and where the Scholar Gipsy won’t ever
return to. So the first thing we come out with is that Beauty gone Sick.
And what comes next is:
"The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm".
The physical set up is just like a horror film or more fearful to keep the
reader panic- stricken, for those who feel before read. To get things
orchestrated let the words, invisible, flies, night, howl & storm
to be concentrated on. The blood sucking, grueling monsters fly at night, under
the cover of darkness. And as we know nothing is more dangerous than the
darkness both outside and inside, and nothing is more frightening than the
thing we don’t see, ‘invisible’ and ‘night’ make us a point. The danger shaped
in black gets stronger to eat our soul out leaving our wings of imagination fly
to a virgin girl fair enough to be in a duel against protecting her chastity.
To give a special effect storm is introduced by the poet in its profound
ferocity as if Poseidon himself comes out of resting to lead the evil forces
from Pluto’s underworld. Storm, the very word, always works well meeting the
purpose of a writer in trouble delivering the mental conflict. Macbeth’s
witches always appear in storm, Hamlet can never meet his father’s ghost
without the very howling storm, and even King Lear fails to identify the true
nature of life without the presence of a howling storm. But whatever imagery
the symbolic storm touches down, whenever it finds its way through literature
we can have, going down slightly the surface layer, the taste of dual nature of
it, one way making an image of its dreadful appearance and the other the other
way idealizing the inner self storming inside out.
Getting back to the last line of the first stanza we finally discover our
Rose struggling with howling storm in a ‘Waste Land’, idealizing the sickening
society which is :
“…like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain:”
(Dover Beach: Mathew Arnold)
As we approaches to the last part, we see the anti climax taking place:
“Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy”
We don’t need to focus on a lot of words now to unearth the plot. Things set
to get going as naturally April becomes the cruelest month for breeding lilacs;
as naturally the typist girl of ‘The Waste Land’ ( by T.S. Eliot) gets seduced:
“..he assaulted at once ;
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response.”
But the phrase, crimson joy, is planted so artistically as not to pack up
with a natural conclusion .There was joy as not to be found in the waste land.
The tension which was mounting up would have been released, had the word
crimson signifying dark red not been there. Red, especially when it is dark
propel us to think of death in two different ways leading to death: one
signifying the death of virginity and the other reminding us of the ancient
mariner (The Ancient Mariner; Samuel Taylor Coleridge) , who experienced Death
itself with the dark red lips & kiss of death thrust upon his fellows.
Let’s put aside ‘crimson’. However transient the joy might be, the phrase,
‘thy bed’ paves way to another possibility like the piercing beams of light at
the end of a tunnel. The invisible worm stays active in the subconscious layer
of psyche of our Rose.
Taking a u turn it’s time to go for the most striking segment, the
concluding lines of the poem:
"And his dark secret
love
Does thy life destroy?"
We come across ‘dark’ again but, going against its nature, it appears this
time to illuminate the word ‘secret’, which lays a question bare open: when
love should be so.
In this regard Sigmund Freud might help us with his crystallization of the
psyche. All our drives including sexual desires are born in our id (the
unconscious level of our mind) and try to peep out crossing the safety bulb
guarding against them in our subconscious layer. And it is our society that
plays the vital role in shaping the safety bulb. Providing that a drive or
desire go against the social norms or conventional ideology it has to be
plummeted down. It is when secrecy emerges out in the dark layer of our id. But
more a passion gets stronger the more the inner conflict gets stormy, the
balance among the layers go awry to turn our life a shadow of life like living
corps:
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom
this year?”
Standing in the end it worth’s remembering that killing one's passion is a
crime to the romantics and whether you are romantic or not the sugar coated
simplicity it all begins with ‘The Sick Rose’ leaves you on a quest: who is
sick? The Rose, the society or the drive sprouts in our mind?
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