Eight lines and an image that will not explain itself. Blake speaks to a sick rose: an invisible worm, that flies in the night in the howling storm, has found out her bed of «crimson joy», and his dark secret love destroys her life.
Like so many of the Songs of Experience, the poem is a symbol that resists a single reading. The rose and the worm have been read as innocence and evil, love and jealousy, desire and the disease that corrupts it. Blake does not translate the symbol: he sets it down, beautiful and sinister, and lets it work on its own. It is among the shortest and most discussed poems in the English language.
El verso se queda en inglés. Traducirlo de paso sería cambiar la obra por una paráfrasis de la obra.