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What is poetry? “The Sick Rose”: In The Sick Rose no meanings are explicitly indicated for the rose and the worm. Indeed, we are not forced to appoint them specific meanings. The poem might literally be read as being about a rose that has been attacked on a strong night by a cankerworm. The organization of The Sick Rose is so rich, however, and its language so powerful that the rose and the worm refuse to remain merely a flower and an insect. The rose, apostrophized and personified in the first line, has traditionally been a symbol of feminine beauty and love, as well as of sensual pleasures. Bed can refer to a womans bed as well as to a flower bed. Crimson joy suggests the intense pleasure of passionate lovemaking as well as the brilliant beauty of a red flower. The dark secret love of the invisible worm is more strongly suggestive of a hidden or illicit love affair than of the feeding of a cankerworm on a plant, though it fits that too. For all these reasons the rose almost immediately suggests a woman and the worm her secret lover-and the poem suggests the corruption of innocent but physical love by concealment and deceit. But the possibilities do not stop there. The worm is a common symbol or metonymy for death ; and for readers steeped in Milton (as Blake was ) it recalls the undying worm of Paradise Lost , Miltons metaphor for the snake ( or Satan in the form of a snake ) that tempted Eve .Meanings multiply also for the reader who is familiar with Blakes other writings . Thus The Sick Rose has been variously interpreted as referring to the destruction of joyous physical love by jealousy , deceit, concealment , or the possessive instinct ; of innocence by experience ; of humanity by Satan ; of imagination and joy by analytic reason ; of life by death . We can not say what specifically the poet had in mind , nor need we do so .In Blakes poem the rose stands for something beautiful , or desirable , or good .The worm stands for some thing agent. Within t