In “The Sick Rose”, Blake describes a rose that, while sick, isn’t aware. A rose typically is an expression or representation of love. Usually graceful and flowing, a sick rose describes something fundamentally wrong with the institution of love in general. A worm, insects that deal in dirt and decay, has found its way into the bed, alluding to the marriage bed. The worm “flies in the night in the howling storm,” unbothered by the darkness and rain, perhaps because he is most at home in chaos. Marriage is traditionally considered the best way to have the truest and most fulfilling love, and by letting a worm into it, lead to its destruction.

The engravings are helpful in illustrating different states of love at varying levels of decay, Some of the engravings are bright and colourful, the apples at the bottom are bright red and unbothered. The woman on the apple appears healthy and colourful as well. The engravings get progressively darker however, the leaves losing colour and dying, the apple rotting, the woman becomes paler and the sky loses colour. In this way, the engravings not only aid in the reading of the text, but make the calamity feel less inevitable. The amount of engravings makes it feel as though the destruction of love happened in stages, stages that at any time with the proper awareness and care could have been. In addition, because the text is being read not in an anthology, but in an archive accompanied by all of the engravings and other poems, there is more contextual relevance as to the theme the author was trying to convey.

The idea of queer love is heavily exemplified in “Posies” by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson. Firstly, the love the female author is writing about is love for a female. Robinson writes, “I made a posy for my Love/ As she is fair and soft and fine.” Robinson’s flowers are suitable for her lover and represent herself as a female, a small bunch of flowers for someone who is as delicate as described. However, the next stanza outlines what was probably a very real struggle of the Victorian era: competing with the traditional man and woman relationship. The writer despairs as “A bolder man has given her/ A branch of crimson peony”. Just as Robinson’s flowers represent her, the male suitor’s flower personify him. Of course, a bold man would give the person he’s trying to court bright, crimson flowers. Despite the blow the male suitor has dealt her, Robinson gives one last attempt to woo her lover, asking her to “Come let us a posy make.” She lists the type of flowers they can collect, ending with “featherfew’, which is also known as the bride and grooms button. The mention of this flower is one last attempt to dream that perhaps Robinson and her female lover can have the same ability to marry that men and women have.

This poem, and the archive in general, changed my perception of queer love in the Victorian era because even though it’s understood that queerness is not a modern phenomenon, there is this presumption that those same people must have kept their desires hidden. It never occurred to me that they might have made these unapproved relationships open and written about them for everyone to read. This shows that the LGBTQ struggle is not unique to today, but a struggle that many have experience over time.

The poem opens with the speaker, presumably Hughes, talking about a piano player he saw a couple of nights ago. The poem starts off light-hearted and hopeful, as the singer sings about putting his troubles “on the shelf” (line 22). However, by the end of the poem, the story has changed. The singer has “the Weary Blues/ and can’t be satisfied” (line 25-26). The way Hughes reads the poem puts more emphasis on the difference in tone between these two stanzas. In the beginning of the poem in describing the singer, Hughes says “he’s got a lazy sway…/he’s got a lazy sway…” (line 6-7). The way he says “lazy” and the sort of wiggle in the pitch of his voice mimics the movement of someone swaying. Repetition of the line twice emphasizes how lazy and perfect the moment is, in stark contrast to the last stanza of the poem. The difference in speed when saying “Sweet blues!” (line 14) and “O Blues!” (line 16) is also important. The slow deliberateness when he says the “O” in and the short pop for “Sweet blues” is the difference between music that is “coming from a black man’s soul”(line 17) and playing “like a musical fool” (line 13). The length of the “O” is deep and prolonged, like deep feelings of weariness the black community is feeling. By the end of the poem, the feeling of weariness is even more evident. Hughes takes a pause at the end of each line, seemingly taking a breath before he can continue the next line. The very last line “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” (line 29). The slowness of his recitation almost leaves the ready questioning if the man perhaps actually did die, and if it was the weary blues that killed him.