The Sick Rose Analysis

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Anapestic Dimeter with substitutions "The Sick Rose" uses a strange meter called anapestic dimeter, meaning that, theoretically, each line should have two ("di") anapests. An anapest is a three syl...

"The Sick Rose" is a very weird poem, which makes us think that the speaker is a little weird too. There are lots of ways you could picture the speaker, but here's our take: he's kind of like a biz...

Imagine you're working on your hands and knees in your garden one day. You've already tidied up your vegetable patch and you've just moved on to the flower bed when you notice that one of your rose...

Twisted Nursery RhymeYou know how sometimes in cartoons a little devil and a little angel will appear on a character's shoulder and give him contrary opinions about what to do? Well, if William Bla...

The title of the poem refers to the sick rose in the poem that falls victim to the worm's "dark secret love" (7). The poem is called "The Sick Rose," but we don't learn a whole lot about the rose's...

Deceptive SimplicityLet's face it, when you first read "The Sick Rose," your immediate reaction was probably something like, "this poem is really simple: it's about a rose that gets sick and a weir...

(2) Sea Level"The Sick Rose" is a relatively simple poem; it contains only a couple of sentences, and there aren't any strange words that need glossing. Sure the content is a little strange, but it...

Rumor has it that Blake and his wife used to hang out naked in their garden together. (Source)Blake had visions; he once claimed to have seen a tree full of angels while a child. (Source)

PG-13The only reason this poem isn't rated R is that the sex in it isn't explicit; sure it's suggested pretty clearly, but one could make the case that "dark secret love" doesn't have anything to d...