Simplicity in A Red Red Rose
I have seen readers bulldoze through Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” in thirty seconds, or however long it takes to sift all of the letters through their visual screen, and then sit back and say they know it. A bad sign is when, asked to explain it, they start with, “It’s just …” or “All he’s saying is …,” to prepare the listener for the fact that there isn’t much to be said. I don’t know why anyone thinks poetry is something to be understood as quickly as it is read. I do know that sometimes students are forced to read something they do not like, and so want to get the whole experience over as quickly as possible, but if I were them I would be very, very surprised to find a poem that had no secrets, that presented all that it was about to the naked eye. I must admit, though, that Robert Burns, of all poets, tends to make us feel that there is no mystery beneath the surface of his work, and of all his poems “A Red, Red Rose” does the most to make readers feel that they are going over material they already know.
If you are old enough to read, and you grew up in the Anglicized world or have lived long enough in it, then you have either come in contact with Robert Burns’s work or have at least encountered some source influenced by it. Poems that might ring a bell include: John Barleycorn: A Ballad,” “John Anderson, My Jo,” “Coming Thro’ the Rye” (from which J. D. Salinger took the title of his novel The Catcher In The Rye), “Tam o Shanter,” and “To A Mouse” (from which John Steinbeck took the title of his novel Of Mice and Men ). On New Year’s Eve, as the clock reached the stroke of midnight, you might have sung some form of the traditional folk song “Auld Lang Syne”—perhaps even the rendition that Robert Burns set down in print as a poem. These examples, a mere speck in Burns’s canon of hundreds of poems and songs, point to several of the major reasons why Burns is so familiar today. First, other writers quote him often. He was a fun writer who enjoyed using words cleverly, and he was a man of the people and not of the intellectual establishment, and these are both traits that writers often admire and emulate. Second, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that so much of Burns’s writing was taken, either in whole or in part, from songs that had already been around Scotland for years. In those days before copyright law had reached to such diverse forms of intellectual property as songs, popular music was spread by being heard and repeated, for hundreds of years sometimes. If Burns heard a set of lyrics he liked he would write them down, modifying them as he saw fit. In this way he became, not just an important writer in Scottish history, but an integral thread in the weave of Scottish culture. Unlike most authors whose works spawn forward from their time, Burns’s poems stretch in both directions, future and past, from the poet himself. The third element to Burns’s popularity was his use of the Scottish dialect. This stylistic tendency is often a source of trouble and vexation for non-Scottish readers, who have to slow down their reading with frequent trips to the glossary or dictionary, but it has cemented his eternal popularity among Scots. The love of his fellow citizens is so powerful that it...
(This entire section contains 1833 words.)
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is felt beyond the nation’s borders and throughout the world.
“A Red, Red Rose,” one of Burns’s most popular and most anthologized works, actually has the opposite effect on students than his reputation does. Readers may find themselves to be more familiar with the poet’s works in general than they had realized, but they also find that the ideas in this poem are not as familiar as they first seem. The poem is a declaration of love, particularly a vow, upon the occasion of leaving, to keep love alive. It is a situation that does not change throughout the ages, and so impatient readers tend to read this poem once and think that they understand all that it has to say. Too often, readers proceed with a set of assumptions that does not serve them well.
One major mistaken assumption is that life was simpler in the past. The world is always becoming more and more complex, with scientists uncovering more facts, computers enabling us to send the facts around and the arts developing newer ways to turn facts into ideas. People constantly talk about how complicated life is, how simple the good ol’ days were. I myself have heard students try to explain how complex modern family life is now, at the turn of the century, contrasting it to the 1970’s when the standard was the intact nuclear family of Mom, Dad and two-point-five children: the explanation reminded me of how, in the 1970s, I used that same “Mom, Dad and 2.5 kids” formula to explain how much simpler life had been in the 1950s. We were all drawing on the oversimplification of television. So long as we can understand events in historical perspective better than we understand them as they are happening—that is, forever—we will always look on the past as a simpler time.
And so, many modern readers assume that “A Red, Red Rose” is straightforward, with no particular guile. They write this assumption off to their concept that people in the past did not know how to present a complex relationship, even if they knew how to have one. Such readers give up analyzing after they realize that the red rose symbolizes love in this poem, a realization that any Valentine card could explain. They think that it was all Burns could do, in his backward time, to set his ideas down on paper. Without a historical perspective (and who in American schools has much of a sense of history anymore?), Burns’s poem from the late 1700s is as crude and basic as some cartoon caveman in an off-the-shoulder pelt grunting, “Me like.”
If the speaker of this poem seems to lack guile, couldn’t it be that he wants to seem naive? It is, after all, a love poem, and unfortunately there is as much trickery in love, as much subtext, as in poetry or in the arts in general. There is, for instance, one open and ambiguous line that could be read as an indication of the speaker’s deep sincerity, but could also, with a different set of assumptions, be taken to mean that the speaker is shallow and superficial. In the second stanza, the first two lines say, in effect, “As beautiful as you are, that is how much in love with you I am.” Readers who accept this poem at face value, thinking that the person’s love must be great because he says it is, read these lines to mean that his love and her beauty are of such magnitude that they can only be compared to each other. But the poem does not say that they are huge, just equal: if her level of fairness is mediocre, his love is lukewarm. Equating love and beauty is not necessarily an indicator of great love, and Burns, if his ambiguous phrasing is any clue, knew that his line would be open to many interpretations. There are other indicators that this speaker’s concept of love is less heartfelt than presented, but that is not the issue here: the point is to raise the question of whether Burns could have designed this poem to be more than a sincere declaration of love.
Another reason readers assume that the speaker is being sincere is that the average person gets their greatest exposure to poetry in schools, where positive, affirmative values, including honesty, are emphasized. We are taught that, all other things being equal, poets’ intentions are most likely noble, and this assumption is fed by the examples of morally uplifting poetry that are, quite properly, used in classrooms. Readers tend to go straight for a poem’s uplifting message because experience tells them that poems often affirm goodness. What this assumption ignores, however, is the power of irony. It is quite possible for Burns to make the world a better place by presenting a lover who is fickle, insincere or even downright conniving. We do not have to agree with the speaker of the poem, we only have to understand him the way he understands himself, so that we know how to deal with attitudes like his when we encounter them in our lives. If we fail to wonder whether there are motives beneath the surface, we run the risk of becoming gullible. The same people who would laugh at someone for believing that an advertisement for “the great American carpet deodorizer” is really about patriotism, as it presents itself to be, are for some reason willing to accept this speaker’s claim of his great love.
He certainly does talk like someone in love. His language is hyperbolic: he appears to think in extremes, the way lovers do. Someone who is headover- heels in mere fondness might claim to love his bonnie lass until the creek goes dry, or until the rocks erode, but a lover in the heat of passion uses excessive language, as Burns does here. The fact that the poem is written using the plain vernacular, the common language of the average Scotsman and not the elevated English of the educated, makes the speaker that much more credible. But even while this speaker’s excitement about this girl makes us trust that he believes what he is saying, at the same time it raises the suspicion that he does not know himself very well. He might be too infatuated with her to understand whether he is in love or not, or he might be working just a little too hard to convince her of his love. There are a number of things that the poet might be indicating with the simple strong language of love, other than love itself.
Readers who feel that an “old” poem like Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” is a simple piece to understand need to put more effort into their reading. Poets do sometimes state simple truths simply, but there is not much fun in that: we understand the implications of the world we live in by understanding the implications of works of art. If a poem like “A Red, Red Rose” has more to tell us than what we all want to hear—that love is wonderful—we may never know it if we don’t look past its surface.
Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.
Interpreting Red, Red Rose
It seems extremely clinical, if not criminal to examine something as tender and beautiful as Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” under the scrutiny of critical consideration. So delicately, so intricately is it wrought that the poem is, in itself, a frail rose. Yet the poem’s delicacy, its fragility, is achieved through a wonderful series of similes that flow from one image into the next and build an argument picture by picture to form, not only a masterpiece in itself, but a wonderful addition to the ongoing tradition of love poetry.
Love poetry is more than mere flattery. It is a high form of rhetorical persuasion. The Song of Solomon, perhaps the model from which Western love poetry has evolved, is a rare piece of epideictic rhetoric where the beloved is praised. In the dialogue of the Song of Solomon, two characters frantically seek each other out throughout the city. Night is falling, and the urgency and necessity of the search is highlighted by the ways in which each voice describes the other it is seeking through a series of similes. The beloved is not seen in his or her own terms but in comparison to other things— the most beautiful things—and the process of finding the likeness of the beloved in other images only adds to the overwhelming sense of desire that the voices convey. Not only does the reader seek the “beloved” in himself in the Song of Solomon; he is driven to seek him, at least partially in other images. And that is part of the appeal of interwoven similes: the love object to which they are applied draws so much into his or her appearance and reflects that appearance back onto so many other objects to the point that the beloved seems to rise out of himself or herself and become not one thing but many. The comparison, in this process, becomes a much broader process than a mere metaphor might accommodate, and the single image proliferates into many images.
This is the process Burns is attempting to highlight in his poem “A Red, Red Rose.” Like John Ruskin, who saw twenty-eight different colors of red in a single rose, Burns is attempting to see a kind of multifoliate array of ideas attached to his beloved. This process of extension, of adding one simile to another can be seen in the way Burns connects one verse to another by repeating the final image from the previous stanza as the first line of the next, either verbally or conceptually. But there is more to Burns’s process of epideictic than mere imagistic or conceptual connectivity. The entire poem turns upon a rather commonplace conceit in the vocabulary of love poetry: the comparison of a woman with a flower.
The first stanza opens with the lines “O, my luve is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June, / O, my luve’s like the melodie, / That’s sweetly play’d in tune.” These two comparisons, the love with the rose and the love with the melody, establish not only two consecutive similes, but a juxtaposing of two very essential concepts: beauty of appearance and beauty of sound. The poem’s imagery looks after the matter of the beauty of appearances. But what catches the reader by surprise is that the beloved, in being compared to a “melodie / That’s sweetly play’d in tune,” is established not only as the subject of the lyric but as the lyric itself. To say that his “luve is like a melodie” is to association the beloved with the poem itself and its very lyricism.
Burns’s use of the quatrains gives the poem a wonderful sense of sonic flow and an overwhelming sense of song. The song is something that the persona carries with him through time (“While sands of life shall run”) and space (“Tho it were ten thousand mile!”) and it is the lyric utterance that connects him to his beloved. But this is no mere song: in the opening stanza Burns repeats the invocative “O” which is another way of calling upon divine assistance for the singing process. The invocative “O”, a means of calling upon either the assistance of the Muses or the help of heavenly song as in the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Henry V, connects the idea of song to the concept of vatic “seeing,” the process where the voice of the poet becomes the medium for some sort of higher utterance and observation than mere reality can provide. The invocative “O” also serves to elevate the entire series of connections and comparisons that Burns undertakes in the poem. The song to which the beloved is compared in line two, therefore, is divine song and Burns has very subtly lifted his subject matter above the mortal concerns of time and space. His love for her will last beyond the timespan of the seas and is stronger than any geographical distance that might come between them. It is divine love by process of allusion.
In the scope of love poetry, what the masters of the sub-genre attempt to do is to elevate their subjects not only through praise but through connection. This was undoubtedly the process behind the Provencal poets of the eleventh century when they co-opted the structures of liturgical hymns to the Virgin Mary and applied them to the praise of mortal women. It was the same impetus of comparison that triggered the sonnet tradition—albeit that tradition is more rhetorical and discursive than lyrical—and it is the reason why even the simplest and corniest love poems, such as “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue” refract the beloved through some sort of comparative mechanism.
But beyond the standard conventions of love poetry, what makes this poem so touching is that it is a poem of departure. In the final stanza, he bids “fare thee weel” “a while” to his beloved and promises to “come again” no matter how far he may roam. Parting love poems are always difficult to evaluate because part of their ancestry lies in works such as Ovid’s Remedium which advises the reader in the ways and means of breaking off a love affair in the classiest way possible. But regardless of the poem’s ancestry and possible underhanded intent, what the reader is confronted with in Burns’s lyric is a situation that strikes a note of pathos. There is a pledging of love which seems sincere because its value and strengths are compared to the question of tests—“I will love thee still my dear / Till a’ the seas gang dry” or “While sands of time shall run.” In a very subtle allusion to the language and structure of Medieval love romances such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s La Romain de la Rose (yet another nod of acknowledgment to that horticultural wonder and symbol of both martyrdom and divine, blood-pledged love), the lover of “A Red, Red Rose” is pledging himself to a test in order to prove his love, not just proffer it. The tests of time and space, the true tests of love, are laid out with great sincerity because they address considerable magnitudes of temporality and spatiality. Such are the linguistic and imagistic conventions of love poetry.
“A Red, Red Rose,” however, is more than a mere exercise in convention. The balance and delicacy of the lyricism, the simplicity of the language in its earthy Scots dialect, and the directness and accessibility of the comparisons make for a very sincere and heartfelt utterance. “So deep in luve am I,” notes the persona in the second stanza, that one does not question the profundity or the verity of the emotion. The series of comparisons are intriguing in their own right, but it is the pledging that drives the poem home as a personal note of dedication and an expression of timeless love.
Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.
