In the poem "Go, Lovely Rose," the speaker addresses the eponymous rose and implores it to convince a woman he likes to "come forth" and "suffer herself to be desired." This woman seems to be refusing the speaker's advances, and seems to think little of his comparing her to a rose. The speaker says that he compares her to a rose because the image of a rose is "sweet and fair." A rose is also of course a conventional, perhaps clichéd symbol of romance and love.

The speaker also wants to convince this woman he likes that she is doing herself no favors by being shy and retiring. When she "shuns to have her graces spied," he says, she is like a rose in a desert. The image of a desert connotes barrenness and isolation, and so the intended implication is that the woman is wasting her beauty by refusing to, as it were, share it with the speaker. The speaker seems to be comparing his advances to the water that nourishes a rose, and he is implying that, like a rose without water, the woman's beauty will wilt and die without the nourishment of his advances.

In the third stanza, the speaker says that beauty which "from the light retire(s)" is worth very little. The image of the light here represents the speaker's unwanted advances, and the implication is that while the woman rejects those advances, she devalues her beauty by hiding it in the darkness where it cannot be seen.