LOVE’S SECRET (William
Blake)
Never
seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.
I told
my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah! she did depart!
Soon
after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.
http://www.online-literature.com/blake/621/
William
Blake
O rose,
thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has
found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
William
Blake
First of all, I want to explain what my paper is going to be about. I’m
going to analyse two poems by William Blake, who is one of the Romantics
poets that we have studied in class. According to the title of the first
poem “Love’s Secret”, we find it’s easy to know what the poem is talking
about. Love is the main idea. Love is around us, sometimes it is with the
right people, sometimes it’s not but it is one of the best pleasures that
a human can enjoy in his life. The word “Secret” can lead us to think that
the author is going to tell us a secret about one of his love stories. However,
if we read the poem, we realize that my first idea is close to the real meaning,
because the author is narrating a sad love story, he feels lovesick.
In
the second poem “The Sick Rose”, Blake is using a personification in the
title of the poem. He gives the rose a human characteristic, the capacity
of feeling. If we read the poem, we find a similarity with the first one;
both talk about a love story. Here, the poet is narrating the story of someone,
it isn’t biographical.
In the first poem, we don’t know if the author is addressing someone or
he is speaking to himself. But we realize that he is talking about a personal
experience. This poem acts as an advice to someone who is in love about what
he never says to his lover: ”Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never
told can be”.
In
the 7th verse, “Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears” the
author is using adjectives related to doubts. Those doubts can usually appear
when you don’t know if your lover feels the same about you, if he/she loves
you and you are giving all your heart to this person. The 8th
verse and the following ones can be interpreted in several ways: the first
one is that the lover has gone away with another man who is unknown for her
but he is more attractive than him and she feels great attraction. The other
interpretation could be that when he confesses his real feelings, she dies
leaving him alone. She has gone to another place where she is better. It
seems like they had started a relationship but soon it had an end. This is
the reason why the author uses “he took her with a sigh”
The author is using natural elements like “wind” to express the death
and the last verse "He took her with a sigh, silently, invisible” refers
to the end of life, because when you die, you don’t breath any more, you
have the last sigh. The lover’s death is something that the author didn’t
hope.
On the other hand, the second poem is like a moan and we can see in the
first verse who the addressee is “O rose, thou art sick!”. Blake
is using a flower, a natural element to express the figure of a woman, probably
his lover. As we know, the rose is an element which symbolizes love, life.
Another natural element is the “worm”, which symbolizes something
or someone is attacking her. However, another interpretation could be that
his lover has another man whom she goes out in the night with, when everything
is dark, and no one can see them. In the darkness, people use to do those
things which are considered shameful in this time. Darkness is similar to
liberation of the sexual instincts. This idea is shown in the 3rd,
5th, 6th verse “That flies in the night, Has found
out thy bed Of crimson joy” The author uses “This secret dark love”
because he is trying to give name to this kind of relationship between
the lovers. Through this poem, and especially in the two last verses, the
author is showing us his real feelings of desperation. He feels his life
is destroyed because when you fall in love with someone, you are happy but
when this relationship ends, everything becomes dark, you don’t see the light
because the light was your lover, this lover who left you. However, this
darkness becomes stronger when you discovered that she/he is with an other
person. In this moment you feel the worst sensation that a Man can have in
his life, you think you are in the depths of despair.
As we can see, both poems follow the same structure and rhyme. The first
one “Love’s secret” has three stanzas with four verses each. The
rhyme is A_B_A_B. We can find visual rhyme: love-move, heart-depart, by-
sigh, be- invisibly. But also phonetic rhyme: love-fears. The second one,
“The Sick Rose” , is divided in two stanzas and the rhyme is A_B_A_B
C_D_C_D.
In
the first poem, Blake uses past tenses to narrate the love story which took
place in one moment o f his life. In the second poem, he is using present
tense because he is telling us a story that not only happened to him, but
also takes place nowadays. Using the exclamations and repetitions in both
poems, he is emphasizing his feelings; he tries to show his sadness in the
1st one and his disappointment in the 2nd one.
In my opinion, the author seems to be frustrated, powerless. We perceive
in these poems a melancholic tone, which reflects that sadness is the feeling
that invades the author’s heart. We can see in these poems that Blake is
an author who gives more importance to the feelings and sensations than to
reason, because they can be manipulated and the sensations are pure. We also
can find in these poems the main characteristics of romanticism: nature symbolising
the feelings and a critic of the society.