" Forms must be apprehended by sense or the Eye of Imagination. Man is all Imagination. God is man and he exists in us and we in Him . " .

             Thus the imagination is man's most important sense, and this is what brings intensity to the poet's perception of reality, objects being no longer things in themselves , as spiritual existence is involved in everything . To the romantic poet reality is not made of scientific general truths, there is only the world of the imagination , by which he means that the spiritual, inner world should not be conceived of as separate from the external , " real " world , in the same way as , to him , the body cannot be considered as a separate entity from the soul of man . .

             William Blake 's famous Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are based on his particular distinction of innocence and experience , two notions that he associates with the same opposition between seeing the world as spiritual , in the Songs of Innocence , and believing in the material world , as in Songs of Experience . Ignorance is in fact for him the experience , seen as not only having knowledge about the material , but using this knowledge , or in living according to the experience of the material world , and forgetting thus the spiritual one . One of his symbols for experience is the worm that corrupts the beauty of the rose in The Sick Rose : .

             " O Rose ,thou art sick ! The invisible worm That flies in the night , Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy : And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy ." ( Blake , 213 ).

             The rose is a symbol of beauty , which is also innocence ,as everything else which is part of the world of imagination. The worm is the experience that corrupts the pure beauty , as it is shown by the verbal phrase Blake uses : " has found out thy bed Of crimson joy ", that is anything that does not protect the mystery of beauty , or does not experience it as such .