Blake's Use Symbolism

In both poems Blake uses the common symbol of a flower to represent a woman to highlight the problem of this conception of the feminine. Though it’s the speaker of the Innocence poem “The Blossom,” the young flower stays stationary while observing the activity of two birds in the same area. The blossom watches the sparrow “Seek[s] [its] cradle narrow” or return to its nest, a representation of a male returning to his home (5). In the next stanza, the blossom notes a robin “sobbing” next to it (10). All of the action in the poem is carried out by the birds while the blossom remains stationary and only “Sees” and “Hears” (4, 10). Activity versus passivity in the poem aligns the birds with the masculine and the blossom with the feminine, plugging into traditional views of each gender in terms of sex and germination. While males, like the birds, actively seek out the right partner, the females, like the blossom, need only exist as an object of desire and attraction. Similar gendering is seen in the Experience poem “The Sick Rose.” Like the blossom, the rose is at the center of the poem even though the action involves a more active being interacting with it. The only verb in the poem attached to the rose is in the first line where the speaker proclaims, “O Rose thou art sick” (1). All of the other action is done by “The invisible worm” that is eating the rose (2). While the birds in “The Blossom” are meant to be read as masculine because of their active role in germination, the blossom’s observation that the sparrow flies “swift as arrow,” an explicitly phallic image, contributes to the bird’s alignment with males (4). The worm in “The Sick Rose” is similarly phallic and, like the bird, takes an active role in the action of the poem.

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...tes the social injustice of expecting a woman to be thoughtlessly passive when it comes to sex and then condemn her for allowing her corruption.

When the two poems are read as a pair a larger irony emerges: the thought that the unthinking sexuality of “The Blossom” is promoted and then condemned when it results in corruption as seen in “The Sick Rose.” The speaker of “The Sick Rose” contributes to this mindset: he observes the woman’s destruction and condemns her for it without noting the inequity of the system that promotes this cycle. It’s even possible that the speaker is a religious figure denouncing the woman for her internal sickness. The corruptive worm is serpentine and evokes the image of Satan leading Eve toward the fall. This reading calls to attention the idea of original sin and puts further blame on women, solidifying the speaker’s blame of the rose.