CHAPTER 46
BENJAMIN MORANT got up and lit a cigarette to try to get rid of his boredom and was thoughtful for a moment when his phone rang.
— Yes, of course... we're on our way...
— Did something happen?
— They left a new riddle.
Igor received the photos and put them on the screen, so Yuliya recognized that, because it would be impossible for her not to know what it was about...
— The Sick Rose...
'DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA what that means?' — Asked Greg after they got into Ben Morant's car.
The teacher nodded.
— The Sick Rose is one of William Blake's best-known works, and similarly... one of the most complex, she then recited the poem she knew by heart and sautéed:
O Rose, you are sick!
A worm through the darkness
Flies invisibly
The howling wind takes it
To the velvet veil
From the depths of your center:
Your dark mute love gnaws
You from within.
— The poem was first published in 1794 — she continued, — before, therefore, even Wordsworth & Coleridge 's Lyrical Ballads, which 'officially founded', so to speak, Romanticism in England, ' The Sick Rose ' is a very, very strange poem.
— What is the meaning of this parable? — Asked Greg trying to associate that bunch of words without any logic "The invisible worm flys in the night" by the "howling storm", discovers the suggestive "crimson bed of joy" of the rose and destroys your life with its black and secret.
Yuliya smiled awkwardly, that always happened to those who came across that poem for the first time, which was now finally being fulfilled in a prophecy.
— And that's it, no explanation of the moral of the story, no idea what the invisible worm might be.
It caught everyone off guard, they were waiting for an explanation and in the end there would be absolutely nothing, they wouldn't take them anywhere.
— And how and why the hell does he fly? — And why in the night, in the storm?
— As for the night — said Igor, trying to be sensible, — we can assume it has to do with what we're trying to prevent, or that William Blake had nyctophilia.—
Greg nodded and laughed, clearly demonstrating that he didn't know what this was about.
— Nictophilia is the attraction to night or darkness.
— Now yes...
'Obviously this is not a poem about gardening and that the two figures are metaphorical,' Yuliya cinched, 'pointing to something beyond themselves, but to what?' Not even Baudelaire, with all his modernity that critics and theorists love to gloss over, in a poem like — The Albatross , — resists that edge of the Enlightenment's desire to explain things, and, even after hammering it into our heads, that who is the king of the air, ends up being reduced to a pathetic little creature when he descends from the skies and is forced to walk, which is the albatross, so the poet, in the metaphor, decides to put in a fourth stanza explaining this relationship:
— Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuées, — said Zumerick in polite French.
— Aaaah, of course, Igor! We would never guess.
Igor and Yuliya laughed and realized that Greg and Ben had no idea what they were talking about.
— Well, jokes at Baudelaire 's expense in French aside, I'm still a hopeless Baudelairean, but going back to William Blake's poem, it's impossible not to notice the heavy aura of eroticism that hangs over "The sick Rose". "Crimson joy" is a very suggestive expression, and the gesture of the worm finding the rose and, one imagines, opening its petals, clearly refers to the lips of the vulva, to the sexual act.
— But in any case, it's morbid eroticism.
— Everything about Blake must be treated as morbid, always think that he was a man of centuries ago and is still today, centuries ahead of us... The critic S. Foster Damon, in a 1924 text, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols gives a somewhat Christianized reading of the poem:
The rose is the flower of Love, and the worm is the Flesh, and Damon identifies in the destruction of the rose an idea that this chaste love is destroyed by sex — and thus Blake would believe in an innocent and pure love, very much in line with a certain castrated vision that one has of romantic poetry.
— But that's a pretty innocent sight, — Gregoy Evans said.
she nodded
— Without wishing to do a biographical reading here, I would like to remind you that historian Marsha Keith Schuchard, in her book Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision, points to documents that confirm an early suspicion of hers, that the Blake's were affiliated with a rather curious church, the Moravian Chapel, on Fetter Lane, led by Count Zinzendorf.
— But you said he was...
— Miltonian? Yes... and it was, however, not his family, and that eventually extended to him, more like a family tradition than an actual adept.
— I understood.
— To explain and understand what happened in the Moravian Chapel, it is enough to think of the already famous descriptions of the mystical ecstasy of Santa Teresa d'Ávila, which are very similar to the description of sexual ecstasy.
— But in the case of the Moravians, — interrupted Igor Zumerick, — the resemblance was not metaphorical, and in fact Count Zinzendorf encouraged open relationships among church members, taught sex education classes for newlyweds, and instructed prayers and hymns aimed at the wound. on the rib of Jesus, which has a long history of iconographic representation, in which it resembles a vagina.
— Yeah... And it seems that the Moravian Chapel also had something with the appropriation of notions of kabbalistic meditation applied to sexual practice, such as focusing on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which would allow visionarism, anyway, I'm going too far already. about the subject. The point I want to make is that Blake was no Álvares de Azevedo, who dreamed of pure virgins among unattainable clouds. And this is far from being a mere biographical detail, we find these reflections in his art as a whole and especially in his poetry, which makes Damon's reading seem somewhat misguided, perhaps reflecting the conservative values of his own time.
— The same is true of the criticism surrounding Shelley, — said Igor, — often, not by chance, compared to Blake, read as a poet of pure spiritual love, but who on closer reading reveals a praise of free and loving love.— a very marked carnality.
Yuliya nodded.
— I met with a professor at the University of Minnesota named Norman Fruman, who recounts a classroom anecdote in which a student suggests that the poem's invisible worm is a phallic symbol, to which another student responds:
— If you think the invisible worm is a phallic symbol, you need to get yourself another boyfriend...
— Despite the wit of the girl's joke, it turns out that the worm does indeed have a phallic connotation in Blake. He appears in — The Book of Thel— with this double symbology of image of sex (phallus) and death (the worm that gnaws at corpses), he is a pathetic figure, because the narrative takes place in Beula, the garden of innocence, in Blake's mythology, which Thel inhabits and refuses to leave. In the state of innocence there is no death and generation, and so Thel pities the ridiculous little creature, at once an innocuous worm and an infantile penis. And that changes a lot in — The sick Rose —, not a poem from the book of innocence, but of experience.
Greg watched as Morant lit a cigarette and puffed in the air, trying to filter out as much information as possible.
— And here I'll have to quote Harold Bloom, I know a lot of people have a problem with him, and quite rightly, but the early Bloom was a great reader of the Romantics, and his book The Visionary Company: a reading of English Romantic Poetry of 1961 is an excellent introduction to Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, written at a time when I was not yet completely obsessed with Kabbalistic terms, influence angst, and canon advocacy. In the section on "The Sick Rose", which merges with an earlier section on the poem "Earth's Answer", also on sexual domination, Bloom says the following:
But lovers meet in the forests of the night and not in the light of day. This theme finds its perfect expression in "The Sick Rose", thirty-four words that form a wonderfully compact poem. As with "The Tyger", the difficulty of this poem makes it inherit the problematic tone of its exclamatory opening:
O Rose, thou art sick!
— The emphasis here is on the word "art" and the tone is macabre, with the assertiveness of a prophet who has seen his prophecy of calamity fulfilled:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,And his dark secret loveDoes thy life destroy.
— The bed needs to be 'discovered' because it is hidden, and it is already a bed of 'crimson joy' before the worm gets to it. The elements of deliberate concealment and sexual self— gratification make it clear that the poem is an invective against the myth that it is women who run away and men who seek them out, with its sinister pattern of sexual refusal and subsequent destructiveness. The love of the worm is a dark and secret love, and therefore it destroys life, but the worm comes invisibly at night and by the action of the howling storm, because a solar and declared love could not be received.
— Neither the worm nor the rose are to blame, — complements Zumerick who seemed to be in sync with Yuliya.
— Yes, indeed, because it was Nature that hid the bed of the rose and thus set the male and female generative opposites against each other. The poem's strength lies in the suggested human parallel, where concealment is more elaborate and destructive marriage — rape is a social ritual. And this reading seems to me to be more in line with the general ethical sense of the mythology elaborated by Blake, which has no room for this simple dichotomy between "pure" love and erotic love — a dichotomy whose implicit tone of discipline and prohibition refers to Urizen.
— The demiurge of Blakian cosmology who represents law and reason and aims to restrict human freedom...
— Yes, and, in any case, it is too angelic to start from the same persona who complains, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that Swedenborg only ' wrote the old falsehoods ' because he had talked:
— Only with the Angels, who are all religious, & not the Devils, who all hate religion.
— This topoi of love, which is destructive because it is forced to be hidden and clandestine, already prepares the ground for the homosexual reinterpretation of the poem in the context of the second half of the 20th century, in the hands of figures such as filmmaker Derek Jarman, who was great Blake reader. Not coincidentally either, electronic and industrial music group Coil, who worked with Jarman on projects such as The Angelic Conversation and Blue, use the poem on their Love's Secret Domain album.
Greg and Morant's faces indicated that the nerdy ex couple were going too fast.
— But let's get back to the text. Note that Bloom, unfortunately, as he often does in his analyses, does not pay much attention to the most basic formal elements of the poem. To give an example, the punctuation used by him, which has that horrible exclamation point, is different from what you see on the plate on which the poem is illustrated:
The idiosyncratic punctuation, with this lack of commas, adds an extra layer of strangeness to the poem, along with its irregular meter, which leads to a syllable count of 5/6/5/5 and 5/4/6/5:
the / ROSE | thou / art / SICK |
the / in / VI | si / ble / WORM |
that / FLIES | in / the / NIGHT |
in / the / HOWL | ing / STORM |
has / FOUND | out / thy / BED |
of / CRIM | son / JOY |
and / his / DARK | sec / ret | LOVE |
does / thy / LIFE | dest / ROY |
— In the first verse we have a jambo which is the weak syllable + strong syllable and an anapesto, weak syllable + weak syllable + strong syllable, then two anapestos in the two following verses and a combination of anapesto and jambo that reverses the one in the first verse. "Of crimson joy" consists of only two jambos, and "dark secret love" is a complicated expression to scan, because of the dynamics of strength between the tonics of English in which adjectives usually end up losing to verbs and nouns, but here there is an adjective tunnel and thus we have three options:
* We imagine that this is an anomalous line in the poem with 3 tonics, and we read it with the unpleasant clash of two tonics (DARK | SEC | ret) or even with the "dark" losing its tonality to the "his" (which is well forced);
* We assume that the metric foot used is one with three unstressed syllables and a stressed one, the so — called peony (and / his / dark / SEC | ret / LOVE), which is a rather bizarre option;
* Or we still read "secret" as being an entirely unstressed word, which is also a very strange option, making it the second anapestic verse.
— It was with these things in mind and more, as I believe these small dissonances serve to make it more intriguing and even, I would venture to say, modern. The worm ended up here becoming a pest, in the botanical sense of the term, since the word "worm" in English has a more generic connotation than in Portuguese. For example, it does not seem common to me to speak of apple or guava worm, for us, at least in the linguistic variation to which I am used, we say "bicho", that the fruit is "bichada", while "worm" is common in such cases in English, and Blake's illustration shows us a caterpillar. "Prague", moreover, also allows an alliteration with "storm", and Jeremy Biles identifies in the expression "howling storm" an offshoot of the word worm (hoWling stORM) that it becomes possible to approach, in translation, with "procela" and "chegara", in the following verse (PRocelA, cheGAra). I also tried to reproduce a certain irregularity of meter, although I didn't stick so much to the structure of the metric feet of the original, and of punctuation, as well as the repetition of the letter "o", which in the original occurs in all verses except the third that appears to be significant.
— But the question that remains unanswered, — said Morant, — where will this lead us?
Greg thought for a moment.
— You said the text can be understood metaphorically, didn't you, Yuliya?
— Yes, that's right...
— What if it's somehow... literal?
— I find it quite difficult in Blake's case.
— But we're not dealing with Blake, after all, below the drawing they wrote The Wheel Sick.
She nodded visibly in disapproval.
— Maybe they made a mistake, because the rose is somehow shaped like a wheel.
— Many things are shaped like a wheel, Yuliya, including a rose.
— Sorry, Greg, I don't understand.
— Then I think it's simpler than we thought...
Greg looked and seemed to be seeing fireworks as he showed astonishment to the others.
— What's going on with the London Eye?
— Maybe we're too late to get to our Wheel sick...