The poems "The Sick Rose," by William Blake and "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," by Emily Dickinson both deal with the theme of death. One deals with the inevitable loss of beauty in the rose; the other deals with the inevitable loss of beauty in living for a human. Yet both poems are able to use tone, language and imagery to convey the fact that, while death may inevitable and unpleasant, there is victory in eternity because one enjoyed beauty while alive. This paper will show how both authors use imagery and other poetical devices to convey their universal and eternal themes in addition to creating lasting images of reality through the creativity of poetry.
In "The Sick Rose," Blake provides a short poem that has a large theme. He uses the image of a rose, and its destructive rose worm enemy, to convey the message that even the most beautiful creations are dying, even as people might be enjoying their beauty (much as in life people might be enjoying the companionship of a friend without knowing they have terminal cancer). For example, irony is employed in the sense that the rose does not even know it is sick until the speaker of the poem tells it so: "O Rose, thou art sick: The invisible worm, That flies in the night,á.á.á.áHas found out thy bed" ("Rose"). In addition, irony is also employed by the fact that the "dark secret love" of the worm does destroy the life of the rose. This is ironic because it brings to mind the old clichT that "One man's poison is another's cure." The worm's destruction of the rose is his secret love, but it is the rose's death.
Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," is another poem in which the theme is death, but Dickinson's lengthier work has the message that eternity is not going to be so bad. For example, the end mood is positive because the last stanza is an allusion to the principle that "Time flies when you are having fun." Eternity may not be so bad because Dic...