The Sick Rose AO5

• 'The destruction of love by selfishness, of innocence by experience, of spiritual life by spiritual death'

  Bowra
• 'Self-restraint and sexual repression is, for Blake, destructive.'


  Carey
• 'Inhibition and frustration are so deeply bound up with sexuality that they are impossible to transcend'

  Damrosch
• 'A symbolic representation of something rotten in England'

  Matterson & Jones