What's the analysis of the poem The sick rose by Blake?

O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,



Has found out thy bed

Of...

The two quatrains in this poem have a rhyme scheme of ABCB.  Since the lines are fairly short, it adds to the dread that can be felt in the poem.  Literally, the speaker is addressing a rose...

The poem "The Rose" is about a relationship that has changed.  A rose in literature represents love.  Relationships often give way to problems.  The worm that has been secretly eating at the rose are the problems that develop in a realtionship.  Like the rose, the realtionship ends.  The lover is left without the person he loves scorned and alone.

The poem is open to many different interpretations.  Other's have ineterpreted it to be about illness and death.  The poem does not have any type of rhyming pattern.

To start off, the background for this poem is set in England in 1794, a time when one of the only jobs a woman could get was one within prostitution. The overall idea of the poem is the spread of syphilis from a man who has had sex with a prostitute then had sex with his wife who happens to be with child. The syphilis is then spready to the child causing severe defects and ultimately death.-The Rose is a metaphore for 'love'. A love that is in some way sick or malfunctioning. The invisible worm references to some type of bacteria or virus, which if looked at under a microscope would look like a worm, and because it is so small would be seen as 'invisible.' meaning that the invisible worm would be syphilis, which happened to be very common in that time. "that flies in the night" means that it is spread in the night in a howling storm, referring to the howling of pleasure, or sex. This references to the man fornicating with the prostitute and then his wife. "And his darke secret love which thy life destroy." This means that because the syphilis was spread to the child it the child's life was lost. -