[Wilbur is an American poet respected for the craftsmanship and elegance of his verse. He employs formal poetic structures and smoothly flowing language as a response to disorder and chaos in modern life. In the following essay, first published in The New York Times Book Review in 1968, Wilbur examines the structure and tone of Burns's poem, "A Red, Red Rose."]

Some months ago a professor friend, who was putting together a textbook on explication, invited me to take a poem of my own choosing and attempt a model commentary on it. I began, of course, by trying to think of something knotty about which to be clever, but the lines from Burns which I have quoted, and which are often in my mind, kept proposing themselves. I am fond of "A Red, Red Rose," and what we like, we like to talk about. Was there, however, anything much to be said about a poem so admirably simple? My curiosity obliged me to write what follows.

The first four lines of Burns's poem are often quoted as examples of simile, and the remaining quatrains could reasonably be searched, in a beginners' English class, for such other rhetorical devices as hyperbole. Except for these illustrative uses, however, the poem does not seem to invite analysis. What is being asserted is very plain; a man is declaring his deep and lasting love for a woman; and one would not listen straight-faced to any interpretation which sought, for example, to discover religious allegory in the poem's "rose symbolism" or "end-of-the-world motif."

The individual words of the poem present no difficulties or ambiguities, and there is no actual need of footnotes to tell us that "gang" and "weel" are Scots dialect words for "go" and "well." I suppose that some reader might waver between two understandings of lines 5 and 6—do they mean "My love is proportional to your beauty" or "You are as fair, and I as enamored, as the foregoing would suggest"?—but the uncertainty would not derail his reading of the whole.

There is really no end to what need not be said about this poem, and, of course, it is one mark of the good critic that he abstains from busywork. If we encountered the phrase "all Hell broke loose" in a poem by T. S. Eliot, we would be well advised to trace it back as far as "Paradise Lost," with a view to applying Milton's adjacent lines and general thought to the Eliot passage. But if we found the same phrase in a doggerel poem by Robert W. Service, we would presumably have the sense to forget about Milton, and to remember that the expression in question is well established in offhand, everyday speech.

A similar discrimination is called for in deciding how much to make of the supposed echoes and borrowings in this little Burns poem. The words "Till a' the seas gang dry" might legitimately put us in mind of Isaiah's Jehovah, who thunders, "Behold, at my rebuke I dry up the sea," or of this sort of thing from Revelation: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more."

But the good likelihood that such passages underlie Burns's line need not be dwelt upon. The poem has precious little to do with Isaiah or John, and it would be foolishly pedantic to leave the amorous preserve of Burns's little song for the domain of prophecy. The most we should say of "Till a' the seas gang dry" is that, in a Bible-quoting age and a Calvinist culture, it was a ready and vivid way of saying "Indefinitely," and that in any age it is intelligible without recourse to Scripture.

Burns's editors tell us that "A Red, Red Rose" also contains borrowings, of a more provable kind, from Scottish folk songs. This is not surprising, since at the time of the poem's composition Burns was engaged in gathering and editing the traditional songs of his countrymen. Do we need to know the folk sources on which Burns drew? Probably not. It might somewhat improve our feeling for the convention in which Burns was writing if we saw a few of his words in their original settings; but those settings, those contexts, would be unlikely to add anything specific to our understanding of his straightforward utterance here. Self-evidently, "A Red, Red Rose" is an autonomous work, the articulate gesture of one imagination, and its echoes enforce no excursions.

Or that is how it strikes me and most people. But supposing there were some reader unable to prove the unity of the poem on his pulses, someone who saw it instead as a loose sheaf or anthology of pretty lines—could one hope to change his mind for him? The attempt would best begin, I should think, with an apparent concession: the implicit dramatic situation of the poem can seem inconsistent or uncertain. In the first four lines, Burns's lover is praising his love in the third person, and to nobody in particular; she does not seem in any sense to be "there." In the second and third quatrains, however, repeated assurances of fidelity are directed to the beloved, who now turns up in the second person. Should one imagine her as present, or merely as present to mind? Is she being addressed, or evoked? The question can be difficult to decide, and the "fare thee weel" of the last stanza can leave one still in doubts. If this is a good-bye poem, spoken to a woman, is not the fact of parting unconscionably delayed? Or if the poem is not to be read as arising from an implicit "scene," may one not condemn the thirteenth line as abrupt and opportunistic, a way of getting a little more hyperbolic mileage out of the material?

Such questions and charges cannot be answered with that air of scientific demonstration to which explication so often aspires; but a reasonable argument for the poem's coherent shape can be made on two grounds, the rhetorical and the psychological. George Gascoigne once said that when praising a lady the poet should "neither praise her chrystal eye nor her cherry lip, etc.," these notions being trite and obvious; he should, rather, find some means whereby his pen might "walk in the superlative degree." Burns's first quatrain consists of comparisons that are essentially stale poetic compliments, trita et obvia, but which are freshened and rendered "sincere" by colloquial simplicity and the implications of dialect. The effect is of a pastoral eloquence, and this eloquence, warming to itself, proceeds in the remainder to speak of love not in roses and melodies but in brave hyperboles which stop just short of eternity and infinity. The peak of excitement comes in lines 8 and 9, where the poet's first bold figure is raptly or vauntingly repeated, with one stanza sailing on into the next; lines 12 and 16 then continue and exhaust the hyperbolic attack. What we seem to have, then, is a poem that moves from one rhetoric to another, a flight of words that begins on the ground of conventional simile and soars into excessive affirmations which, though not without literary precedent, here seem spontaneous. The shape of the poem can be described as the escape of a fervent imagination into its own language, and anyone may prove this in a moment by reading the poem aloud, con amore.

There is also another and congruent development in the poems as I read it, and that is the movement of the thought away from the nominal subject. Burns's first stanza may be conventional compliment, but it has to do with the young lady, and argues a concentration of the poet's thought upon the definition of her beauty. From line 6 onward, however, that subject has been left behind; "my dear" becomes almost perfunctory, and in the most striking and exultant passages of the poem what the poet celebrates is the stamina of his own feeling. All of the magnitudes of the poem belong, not to the lady, but to the lover's devotion. It may be argued that love-songs, if they are to be fresh, cannot forever be dealing foursquare with the addressee, but must come at her with some inventive obliquity. But whereas such a song as Byron's "There Be None of Beauty's Daughters" (which I recommend for general comparison) withdraws from its lady into the elaboration of a simile, and then converts all into praise of her at the close, Burns's poem forsakes the lady to glory in Love itself, and does not really return. We are dealing, in other words, with romantic love, in which the beloved is a means to high emotion, and physical separation can serve as a stimulant to ideal passion. Once this is recognized, once we see that the emotion of the poem is selfenchanted and entails a spiritual remove, the presence or absence of the lady becomes unimportant, and the idea of parting seems less the occasion of feeling than an expression of it.

It is oddly difficult to write about romantic love without inclining to denounce or ridicule it; we have our reservations about that emotional economy even in the present age, when a version of romantic of love is celebrated by all media, high or low, and the speeches of Friar Laurence are impatiently cut in every production of Romeo. We still understand when La Rochefoucauld says, "There are some people so full of themselves, that when they are in love, they find means to be occupied with their passion, without being so with the person they love." Molière's Alceste still amuses us by telling Célimène that he could wish her wretched, friendless, and obscure, so that he then might raise her from the dust and

proudly prove
The purity and vastness of my love.

We join Célimène in laughing at a lover who can so separate "his love" from its presumptive object as to imagine exalting the one at the cost of the other's suffering. We can also be persuaded by W. H. Auden's criticism of romantic love in his poem "As I Walked Out One Evening." The "I" of Auden's poem overhears a lover making large promises which are surely reminiscent of Burns:

The poem then proceeds to rebut these lines, saying that the human heart is too selfish and perverse to make such promises in good faith, and that the one real hope lies in striving, despite all weakness, to

love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.

How far does Burns's poem expose itself to that kind of correction? Not at all. His poem is not a play, within which the consequences of romantic feeling can be tested in action; it is an effusion in vacuo. Nor is Burns's poem an argument or meditation, as Auden's essentially is. It is a song. Like all true songs, it is simple and relaxed in its language, allowing only so much point or verbal brilliance per line; it is full of repetitions of word and idea; its grammatical divisions coincide with the line endings; it is perfectly suited to being set and sung, and though beautiful in itself could profit by the complement; finally, it has one thought or mood, which is developed to full intensity. While some poems—the Auden poem just cited, for one—make artful use of song techniques for the projection of complex and contradictory matter, the song in pure form is an unqualified cry. A cry does not argue with itself or with us; nor we with it. We do not question the resentment of the still-charmed lover in Campion's "When Thou Must Home," or the right of D'Urfey's "Roaring Boy" to roar; "A Red, Red Rose" is one state of soul handsomely vented, and that is all we ask. The emotions of song are privileged.