“O is a shout to call you out, rose; a rose by any other name, thou is the name I used to call you, art is what you used to be, sick means you have fallen”
William Blake is from the Romantic period and his poetry is shaped by his view of life and death, like the famous Danish poet Emil Aarestrup. My overall interpretation so far is a sexual dilemma about wanting something that’s not good enough for you.
But you can also turn it around and see it as a basic fact of nature, that the rose’s destruction is a necessary consequence of existence. Like the fact that we are born, we grow and suddenly we die. Maybe the dramatic relationship between the two in the poem is a reflection of how we live our life, that we are insignificant creatures made of organic matter, and like all other organic matter, we eventually rot. It requires strength to live in the present. The way that William Blake uses the rhythm and the rhymes in the poem underlines this simple truth but the way he use the symbols encourages us to look for a deeper meaning in the poem, because it is often the simple things we forget in the search for ‘deeper’ meaning, and that is what Blake fully exploits and recreates in the simplicity of his poem. There is nothing insidious about a worm, which is to prosaic for us, so we give it significance, like psychological, religious, and political and so on. He’s underlining that youth and beauty is transitorily. The symbols and the simplicity and the rhythm/rhyme pull in opposite direction of the way you will normally understand and interpret this poem. There is, as mentioned before, a lot of different angles you can look at this poem from, so called multi interpretations.
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