The Sick Rose: Or; Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

Product Information

THE GROTESQUE FACTOR FUNDACIóN MUSEO PICASSO MáLAGA/LEGADO PAUL, CHRISTINE Y BERNARD RUIZ-PICASSO ISBN: 9788494024924 The two quatrains of this poem rhyme ABCB. The ominous rhythm of these short, two-beat lines contributes to the poem’s sense of foreboding or dread and complements the unflinching directness with which the speaker tells the rose she is dying. Analysis

Blake's prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language". His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced." Although he only once travelled any further than a day's walk outside London over the course of his life, his creative vision engendered a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced 'imagination' as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself". The bed is described as being “of crimson joy.” The redness of the rose and the bed both speak to the passion and at the same time, anger and even blood. All three of these connect to the larger metaphor, the loss of a woman’s virginity. His auspicious time that is the night shows that he comes like a ferocious creature to vigil and extend disease into the object he chooses. The worm desires to fly not just at night but also when the tempest blows and there is tumult in the air. But all the greater is its authority and dynamism since it can even endure the stormy ambiance. If the worm outshines in strength the rose is comfortable. Its easy and undemanding petals of joy welcome the strength of the worm though it turns unwell later. For a time, condemned criminals were routinely sentenced to death and public dissection, their bodies donated to the Medical Institutes*. This practice was ended in the early 19th Century, but parliament allowed that any person found dead without identification and/or someone willing to claim their body would be fair game for anatomical research. This amounted to depriving the poorest classes of any guarantee that they would be given a decent burial, and many were outraged that poverty alone meant they might be dissected publicly like criminals. 'Burial Insurance' became a popular method of avoiding the indignities that might have been inflicted on their bodies. As test subjects became scarce, members of the nascent medical community were complicit in murder, paying money to the 'Ghouls' that stalked the harbors for departing ships, where they would kill drunken sailors not likely to be missed and deliver them to the Anatomists.

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’? Everything rendered here from cholera—depicted in eerie teals—to gout—with massive orblike tumors throbbing beneath the skin—is as aesthetically arresting as it is off-putting. If you’re the kind of person who guiltily sneaks off to watch a zit popping or a deworming video on YouTube, wondering what’s wrong with you, this is the book for you. 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).

The writing is informative and impeccably researched, delving into the gruesome history of anatomical study in a professional manner that walks the tightrope between sensationalistic indulgence of morbid fascination on the one side, and overly clinical jargon designed to emotionally distance the reader on the other. It’s hard, maybe impossible at this great remove to truly appreciate a pre-photography world. It’s like trying to imagine a world where the only way to experience music was to hear it live. The howling storm is an interesting image at this point in the piece. By adding this tidbit about the setting, it is clear Blake wants the reader to know that the worm is able to make it through dangerous conditions. It can find the rose whenever it wants to. Perhaps this has something to do with its invisibility. A feature that is also be linked to its ability to get close to the worm. It might not seem like such danger at first. Blake’s key themes are religion (verses from his poem Milton furnished the lyrics for the patriotic English hymn ‘ Jerusalem’), poverty and the poor, and the plight of the most downtrodden or oppressed within society. He is not a ‘nature’ poet in the same way that his fellow Romantics are: he seldom writes with the countryside in mind as his principal theme, but draws on, for instance, the rich symbolism of the rose and the worm to create a poem that is symbolically suggestive and clearly about other things (sin, religion, shame, cruelty, evil). The poem might be read, slightly differently, as a take on Christian doctrine: ‘worm’ can also be a poetic word for ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’, and this conjures up the Garden of Eden (that bed of roses again?). The Satanic serpent which persuaded Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge is motivated by a desire for revenge against God, and the pure earthly paradise God has established with Adam and Eve.

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

QUESTIONS TO ASK BEFORE YOUR BAT MITZVAH WENDY'S SUBWAY/CARPENTER CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY/INSTIT ISBN: 9798986337524 In form and language, Blake’s poetry can appear deceptively simple. He is fond of the quatrain form and short lines (usually tetrameter, i.e., containing four ‘feet’). But his imagery and symbolism are often dense and complex, requiring deeper analysis to penetrate and unravel their manifold meanings.

Hence, the design expressed by Blake has also been construed as having sexual allusions. Its subject is copulation. Based on Freudian psychoanalysis, the rose can be deemed as the feminine and the worm as male. These representations, or the scheme following them, blend concealed feelings of offensiveness and harsh reprimand, culpability and coercion. These emotions of shyness are in fact associated with sexual understanding particularly in the adolescent psyche.

SparkNotes—the stress-free way to a better GPA

Perhaps, though, the shame is not the result of some evil desire or deed but of Christian indoctrination: especially during Blake’s own time, sexual desire was viewed with suspicion and shame by many, as a result (in large part) of Christian teaching, which taught that it was sinful unless it took place within marriage (and, in many teachings, purely for the purpose of procreation, rather than pleasure). The earliest years of what would become modern medicine were remarkable in the lengths these 'Resurrectionists' went to in obtaining corpses for study. Doctors functioning under the influence of dangerously obsessive desires, be they purely for intellectual enlightenment and eventual renown, or something far more perverse, created a dark and ugly industry... and in 18th and 19th century Europe, that's really saying something. 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. Blake chose to make use of a complicated metrical pattern that is most closely associated with anapaestic dimeter. This means that, if the meter is perfect, each line should have five beats. The first two syllables are unstressed and the third is stressed. Although the poem can be categorized with this meter in mind, there is only one line, the seventh, which is perfectly structured as anapaestic dimeter. William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key English poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is sometimes grouped with the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although much of his work stands apart from them and he worked separately from the Lake Poets.