O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
I believe that his poem is about a disease killing a beautiful person. "The invisible worm" symbolizes a disease. A disease can not be seen, thus, "invisible," and a disease inhabits a body like a worm in a corpse, feeding on the life of the afflicted the way that a worm feeds on the petals of a rose. The rose symbolizes a body. The disease "flies in the night," because it arrives seemingly over night; you wake up in the morning and you are sick. The "bed of crimson joy" refers to the life of the diseased person. The "dark secret love" of the disease is its need to become one with the person it is invading in order to survive. The irony is that the disease's life will end the life of the person. The poem has a rhythm that reads so that each line of the poem sounds like a separate statement.
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I did this poem also. I like the way how you interpret the worm as a disease that slowly kills the body. And since a disease is invisible, you can only see the living being dying. I think that the "invisible worm" killing the rose was all the bad things that happen in life that destroy the good things. It kind of proves that for every good thing there is an end. The poem was short and to the point.I think that Blake did a good job because he wrote the poem in a way where everyone can interpret it differently.
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