Since everyone knows that William Blake was Virgina Woolf's son, it should come as no suprise that they share a postmodern sensibility. In Blake's poem, "The Sick Rose," the rose is a symbol for a tree. The worm which infects the rose symbolizes a plague of locusts that comes to kill the rose/tree. The existence of the worm/locusts is implicit in the very existence of the rose/tree, or, as Jacques Derrida might argue, the locusts deconstruct the tree.
             The fact that the words "sick" and "rose" both have four letters is fundamental to the meaning of the poem, for Blake was 44 years old when he wrote it. He had also been sick for some time. His biographer, Simone de Beauvoir, suggests that his parents often brought him roses during the sickness. Once a worm crawled out of one and spoke to him in a mystical language. This is why Blake says we must all create our own mythologies or have the mythologies of others thrust upon us. The church that Blake founded after this mystical experience was called the Fourth Mystical Church of London. There's that "four" again.
             The meter of the poem is also important. Since a meter is slightly more than a yard, it gives the poem an expansive tone. Blake used this extra space to maximum effect, allowing him several extra letters in some lines. In fact, some lines fairly "howl," like the wind from which the worm derives. Likewise, the rhyme scheme of the poem augments the poem's meaning. Blake schemed to make all of his lines rhyme, just as the worm schemes to kill that sexy red rose. Red has often been a symbol of roses that die from worms throughout literature, especially in the Golden Age during which Blake practiced his craft.
             In the end, we all die, just as the rose must die. And Blake himself died. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, then named Poet Laureate. Readers will never forget this wonderful writer or the rose that he wrote about so movingly.
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