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 …

…schemes to kill that sexy red rose. Red has often been a symbol of roses that die from worms throughout literature, especially in the Golden Age during which Blake practiced his craft. In the end, we all die, just as the rose must die. And Blake himself died. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, then named Poet Laureate. Readers will never forget this wonderful writer or the rose that he wrote about so movingly.