And poetry, lots of poetry.
Poetry and literature about love is as common as carbon, so... why not do a few romantic poems these four weeks of February.
Love is a difficult thing to represent or describe, which is why we have a proliferation of certain colors, shapes, and pictures to represent it. We use these colors and images to try to shape and define this abstract concept. Love is so profound, and yet so common, we use these images because they symbolize something significant.
Imagery and symbolism, like lovers, go hand in hand. It's possible to have one without the other, but you usually find them in tandem. Sometimes we see symbolism as trying to dig out the author’s deeper meaning behind symbols and images, and we expect symbolism to be deep, profound, and elusive. Not all symbolism has to be so elusive, though. Sometimes, it’s as simple as the symbols of love.
The poem I want to discuss is one of these simple ones. It appears in anthologies and classrooms. I don't think there's anything deeper or more profound in it than its being a love song. Edmund Waller’s “Song” or, as it is more commonly known, “Go Lovely Rose.”
This poem is special to me. I don't have any great romantic attachments to it, but it makes for a beautiful song, and I sang it in my high school choir. It's simple, sweet without being saccharine, and invokes simple, beautiful imagery of a single, impermanent, significant rose.
Roses are simple, delicate, beautiful, and when the speaker of the poem says, “Tell her...when I resemble her to thee,/How sweet and fair she seems to be” (2-5) the speaker addresses the rose and tells the rose to tell the woman he is wooing how he compares the rose to her. The poet relies on the symbolism of the rose, and yet, tries to imbue it with his own symbolism. Roses are common in Western culture as a ubiquitous symbol for love. Giving a person a rose will send a very different message than sending them columbines or poppies, because there's something delicate and romantic in a single rose.
What the speaker of the poem is trying to do is take the collective, societal symbolism of the rose and individualize it – personalize it. He does this by addressing the rose itself about its own symbolism, but he adds to it in the process. He suggests the rose's beauty would have been “uncommended” (10) had it bloomed in a desert. He suggests beauty is beauty whether it is recognized or not. For the speaker, the rose isn't just a beautiful flower symbolic of love because convention says so. He encourages this added symbol of the barren desert as a way to encourage her to “suffer herself to be desired,/And blush not so to be admired” (14-15). The speaker isn’t content to accept the rose as a symbol in and of itself, but mingles the symbolism of the rose with the image, and thereby the symbolism, of the desert to make it as unique as his love.
He then reminds us, and the rose, that the rose will die, regardless of whether it bloomed in a desert or not. There’s a departure from the romantic. Roses don’t symbolize death, and love poems don’t usually end on a note of “and we’ll die some day.” He doesn’t forget that he’s dealing with a plant that lives and dies and not just emotions and abstract symbols. He knows the rose won’t last long, a fine detail vendors don’t mention, but he’s not going to shirk from the truth, and is going to use it to his advantage. In short, to say they should take advantage of “how small a part of time they share” (19).
The speaker takes the rose, relies on the rose’s traditional symbolism, and develops upon that symbolism to make it his own. Which is what we do with love.
Romantic love has kept writers of every sort employed for centuries, each one wringing some new significance, form, model, or moral from it in order to delve deeper into this ubiquitous emotion. I mean, Nicholas Sparks has published 17 novels, and the rose has remained a symbol of love for centuries. Edmund Waller wasn't doing anything new here but his piece does say something about the nature of love and our relationship with it: we try to make it personal.
In a culture where people can build careers on the serialization of romance, and yet, it's something abstract. We can't put our finger on it, and its different for everyone. So the speaker of this piece finds himself in a plight not unlike that of most every person who has fallen in love. He has so many ways to convey this love, but he wants to do something unique.
It isn't just a poem about a man wooing a woman nor is it just about how roses are symbolic of romantic love. It's about how we take these symbols of love and breath new life, new love, into them.
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Works Cited
Waller, Edmund. "Go Lovely Rose." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180684>.
Waller, Edmund. "Song." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 1006-7. Print.
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