Romantics

The sick rose: Title notes

ROSE: frequent association with chastity and virginity - ‘literary love’ - roses represent love and romance in literature.

SICK: personification - immediately presents the idea that this poem is a metaphor for a bigger picture - allegorical

The sick rose: ‘O Rose’

• representation of innocence and love, as well as the emotion of love

The sick rose: ‘worm’

• Contrast to the roses purity - links to phallic imagery and biblical serpents.

The sick rose: Context of the worm

• religion was extremely important in the romantic period - any percieved links to adam and eve and serpents would have been picked up on by the reader.

• Adam and eves destruction due to the temptation of the serpent - so the use of this similar imagery highlights the destructive force of the worm - particularly due to its invisibility. the idea of the worm being invisible links to the notion of desires in the mind and is an allegorical reference to people.

The sick rose: Colour

‘crimson’ - connatations of sin,love,blood and passion - also links to a sense of danger

‘dark’ - eerie, negative, worrisome

The sick rose: ‘his dark secret love’

• ‘his’ - a contempory reader may link the worm to the devil - further links to adam and eve

The sick rose: ‘crimson joy’

• contemporary societal views that sex is something that can be destructive and like roses, sexual desire is transient.

The sick rose:: KEY THEMES

• corruption of innocence - ‘dark secret love’ ‘crimson joy’

• sexuality and desire - ‘life destroy’ - consequences of carnal desire

• destruction and decay - allegorizes the inescapable cycle of death and decay - nothing beautiful or pure can last forever.

THE SICK ROSE

• uses the symbolic imagery of a dying rose, infected by an ‘invisible worm’, to represent the destruction of innocence, beauty and purity by the hidden forces of corruption,desire and decay.