Symbolism In William Blake's My Pretty Rose Tree

It appears that Catherine assumed a subordinate role as a duteous, devoted wife, especially in an incident between Blake’s younger brother and her where she was forced to “kneel down and beg” for his pardon (618). At a professional level, Catherine helped her husband manage his freelance work, “colour the pages of illuminated books” and print plates (619). Despite a longing for them, the couple had no children (Essick, ODNB par. 11). Taking this context into account when reading “My Pretty Rose Tree,” the poem can be interpreted as an attack on his wife. The inability of the rose tree to produce blossoms and roses could be a direct commentary on Catherine’s inability to bare children regardless of Blake’s “tend[ing]” (Blake, Rose Tree 6), the utmost important role of a woman at this time. In the transformation of the tree’s “jealous” is marked by the speaker’s descriptions of her: by the end the speaker no longer calls the tree

He pulls from his personal life, botany writing, and societal values to represent eighteenth-century women through the personification of flowers. As an early sexual liberal thinker, Blake’s complicated view of women. At times, he comes off as misogynistic portraying the feminine within the domestic sphere, as a child bearer, dependent, weak and vulnerable, but he counteracts that with undertones of agency radical to his time. “The Blossom” from Songs of Innocence demonstrates the naivety of young women through their sexual repression. Its contrary in Songs of Experience, “The Sick Rose” provides a shocking image of dual meaning: an active rose seeking her sexual desires; or a passive rose being destroyed by the sexual aggression of the masculine worm. From plate 43, the trilogy of flower songs explores themes and personalities of women through the personification of the rose tree, sunflower, and lily. Like “The Sick Rose” Blake uses his ambiguity to allow for multiple meanings, in which the flowers can be perceived as both active and passive. Through the personification of mostly passive stereotypical eighteenth-century female subjects, Blake satirizes the ideals of women in the eighteenth century and in turn liberates these subjects as free women unbound by their male