What is symbolism? How does the poet use symbolism in the poem “The Sick Rose?

Answer:  Symbolism is a figure of speech in which one object is used to represent or suggest another meaning or fact.

    Blake’s most famous work, Songs of Experience is a set of poems to which his symbolic poem The Sick Rose belongs. Here this poem interprets many symbolic meanings together.

     The poet literally presents a rose as sick because a worm which takes the rose as its bed, begins to hurt the rose secretly and ultimately it destroys the rose. But this poem has many different symbolic interpretations. Firstly, the rose represents beauty, youthfulness and innocence and the worm represents decay, and old age, corruption. According to the poet, every beauty is decreasing like the rose’s beauty. The religious interpretation is that worm may represent the Satan, while the rose represents innocent Eve. The devil corrupted Eve, and therefore she and Adam were cast away from paradise because she sinned. The most convincing interpretation is that the rose represents a woman, while the worm represents a man. The man, who loves her secretly and physically, does not give any dignity to her love. It makes the woman sick. Another interpretation could be that the girl is sexually assaulted against her will by a man. 

         Blake thinks beyond our imagination with his exceptional power of thinking. What he literally describes here, can be seen by anyone who ever places his foot in a garden. But he defies poetic convention and forces us to look at the rose in a different way – corrupted, diseased, dying like us.