Interpretation of The Sick rose and the Eagle

Authors Avatar

Interpretation of The Sick Rose and the Eagle

After studying the two poems, The Sick Rose and The Eagle in class and the discussion among the group, it seems to me that the poems haven’t got only one single meaning. I also noticed that poems could always be interpreted in different ways with different meanings based on your point of view and your personal knowledge and experience. Poems are also open to interpretations.

The Sick Rose is a very decent example of which the poems can be interpreted in different ways. The word “rose” first came into sight in the title, which indicates this word play a chief part in the interpretation of the poem. “Rose” can be a person, as this is a very widespread name for girls in the 20th century. If this is applied to the poem, then it may be about a woman being sick and dying because of sexually transmitted diseases. This has a high possibility as the medical technology then was not as developed as nowadays and the woman might be dying by the time she found out that she was seriously ill. The ‘invisible worm’ could be sperm, as you can’t possibly see sperm. For the two lines of the poem, ‘And his dark secret love, does thy life destroy’ gave me the clue that the sperm was infectious, which killed that beloved woman.

Join now!

        

The poem, as mentioned earlier, hasn’t got only one meaning. “Rose” can also be translated into a kind of flower, with large, scarlet layers of petals, which hide the stigma of the flower. In this case, the superficial meaning of the poem becomes very understandable.  It is about a flower dying as the worm is eating the flower, as common as any other wild plants. ‘Thy bed of crimson joy’ indicated the center part of the flower, and there is where the invisible worm was hidden - you can’t see the worm form the outside.

However, after ...

This is a preview of the whole essay