The fact that the worm chooses to fly in the night suggests something seeking to travel and do its work under cover of darkness, perhaps because of shame night also suggests the world of sleep and dreams, when our unconscious comes to the surface in the form of symbols (symbols not unlike those presence in this poem). ![]() Freudian psychoanalysis is all about unconscious drives, fears, desires, and neuroses note how the worm in this poem is invisible, flies in the night, and possess a love which is dark and secret. Secret to the harbourer, even, we might ask? As the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once remarked, a neurosis is a secret you yourself are not even aware you’re keeping. This might explain the ‘howling storm’ in which the worm ‘flies’: the turbulent emotions and turmoil generated by resenting and hating that which one loves, conflicted desire and disgust.Ĭertainly, a Freudian analysis of ‘The Sick Rose’ is tenable. ![]() This would tally with the fact that the worm harbours a ‘dark secret love’ for the rose: is the worm guilty of jealous love for the rose, whose beauty and ‘joy’ it envies? Is this a version of Nietzschean ressentiment, or Oscar Wilde’s statement that ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’? Or perhaps the sort of thing we encounter in another William Blake poem, ‘A Poison Tree’?
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