Rose, Rosier, Rosiest - the burden of a flower (10.14.22)

Let's write about roses, or The Rose. That is, let's investigate the rose trope in poetry. It's been plucked, paraded, parodied, blasted, rained upon, likened to, analogized, symbolized, budded, withered and bloomed to beat the band in Western poetry since Chaucer at least. It has pricked fingers, graced bosoms, crossed palates, withstood hail and snow, succumbed to hail and snow. It has been sweet and bitter. The rose has been in bud, in full, and sick.

Rose, where'd you get that red?, wrote a kid in one of Kenneth Koch's famous poetry workshops for children. "What's in a name?" asks Juliet. "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."  And "Roses red and violets blew . . ." wrote Spenser in The Fairie Queene (plus every grade school kid in the history of public education in America, with Valentine's Day approaching). Gertrude Stein very nearly settled the argument with her quotable, "A rose is a rose is a rose."

The rose is a lover's messenger:

Go, lovely rose!

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts, where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee;

How small a part of time they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

This poem's by Edmund Waller, an early version of the "go, lovely rose" sub-sub-genre in English poetry. So many speakers of famous poems, from the Metaphysicals to the Romantics, directed their roses to intercede for them (always, as far as I can tell, in the men-seeking-women section of the want ads).

But the women aren't to be out-budded in this department:

Hope is like a Harebell trembling from its birth,

Love is like a rose the joy of all the earth,

Faith is like a lily lifted high and white,

Love is like a lovely rose the world's delight.

Harebells and sweet lilies show a thornless growth,

But the rose with all its thorns excels them both.

"Hope Is Like a Harebell" is by Christina Rossetti. I have no idea what a harebell looks like or even how to pronounce the name, but no matter. I know the rose. And I agree, it excels. 

Now for one of my favorites . . .

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves and hills, and fields

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow Rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,

Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool,

Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,

With Coral clasps and Amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

The Shepherds' Swains shall dance and sing,

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me, and be my love.

. . . by Kit Marlowe, a master of flower imagery in love poetry, and of urgency in the affairs of affairs. There's something pretty darn desperate about this kind of poem, and a helluva a burden for a flower that's prone to pests and diseases, can be easily over- and under-watered, and wilts fast. I'll let you google for Robert Herrick's timeless, "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" - "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may . . .," but you get the idea. If you're feeling desperate, press a rose into action.

Browning had his blasted rose-acacia, in "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," a characteristically sardonic/ironic sinister kind of rosy desperation; go read it again! But William Blake was not to be out-melancholied by anybody when it comes to roses:

The Sick Rose

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.

I recall reading somewhere that he cultivated roses. Easy to believe from the above that he made a lousy job of it, but he sure salvaged the carnage into good poetry.

When you think of a rose, it's always a red one . . . go ahead, admit it. But there's also the yellow rose of Texas (they gotta always be different down  there, don't they?), and the pale pink of the knock out rose, and the white rose and the blue rose and, if you talk a walk around the Gene Stroud Community Rose Garden in Chapel Hill, you're going to find all kinds of colors.

But when it comes to poetry, nothing beats the passionately red rose.

Anyway, here's your project for next week:

Write a poem featuring the rose. It can be about the rose, it can use the rose as a metaphor or an illustration or simply a starting point to a poem about something else. But your poem should contain a rose. If you plan to use your poem to describe a rose, then be forewarned, we're going to look for something fresh, a rose seen from a fresh point of view; a rose described in minute detail from the inside out or the outside in, from top to bottom or vice versa, for some reason beyond just mere description. Or maybe, just maybe, a rose described as what it is, a flower.   

If you're feeling more adventurous, do some background reading on the rose in poetry (just Google that) and see how others have treated it, used it, historically, then try the same yourself. I dunno, maybe a "go, lovely rose" poem of your own.