The poet said to the rose, " His dark secret love does thy life destroy ."
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Answer:
The Sick Rose’ is easy enough to summarise. The speaker addresses a rose flower which is diseased, because some foreign agent (described as an invisible worm) has discovered the rose bed and is destroying the flower’s vitality. But of course, this leaves all our work ahead of us in working out what this rose, and this worm, are meant to represent.
In his study of William Blake, the scholar D. G. Gillham draws a helpful distinction between metaphorical and symbolic imagery, arguing that in ‘The Sick Rose’ Blake does not compare one thing neatly with something else (metaphorical), but rather offers up an image (or collection of images) without telling us what they are to be compared to. This makes ‘The Sick Rose’ symbolic, because the rose, its bed, and the worm which destroys it are all clearly representative of something else, but Blake does not tell us what this something else is.