"Passion" comes from the greek word 'pashko' meaning 'to suffer'

Somewhere last week, I pulled back in time to my first formal english lecture in college. expectedly, after 2 years of stringent technical education, my sense of emotional connection to words had more or less hit an uneventful demise. Yet, a small example by our professor, as if suddenly opened my mind to the power hidden behind words. She walked into the hall and scribbled the following onto the board, 
"

The Sick Rose

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy."

And said this is a poem about love. go figure.

A class full of incomprehension stared back at her (or so I thought). A disease which infects roses maybe? OR a flying worm.....but then why is it talking about a bed. And why is there a statement about love in the end? To be frank, the whole thing was beyond the reach of my mind. Poetry never had made sense to me, and perhaps never would.

Then, the professor made us imagine each line as a detailed graphic, and like a visual illusion things started to take shape. Not in any way tangible, but more powerful, like an idea or an emotion. The following is my best attempt to 'explain'

The 'rose' is not a flower, why?, notice the capitalisation of the R and how it is addressed as a person. The 'Rose', is a powerful symbol for love. By calling it sick, the poet hints at a certain type of corruption. 

The 'invisible worm', usually associated with death and decay, also a phallic image, has crept into the bed of the rose. There is a sense of foreboding in how the stanza ends; similar to a horror movie, with a howling storm raging outside and something stealthily creeping through it.

 The phrase 'crimson joy' has strong virginal correlations; if you think about it, the colour crimson is strikingly different from red, Red being more primal in nature, does not have negative connotations, crimson on the other hand is 'dirty' red or blood red. This phrase enforces the overlay of the carnal act of love over the emotion itself. Yet, the image leaves a bad aftertaste in the mind, does it not?

The final two lines contain the essence of the poem, as they directly deal with the essence of love. 'Dark secret love does thy life destroy'; these lines explain that the poet maintains that the dark and hidden way we treat the physical act of sex, corrupts  and destroys the pure emotion of love.

The fact that such vivid images can be drawn and used to strike deep into the minds and hearts of the careful reader, astonishes me then as it does today. The whole beauty of words lies in their power to conjure emotions out of a sheer idea. 

Well, at least this was my take on it; maybe I have embellished certain details in the text, due to repeated reading.