Literary Analysis of Robert Burns's A Red, Red Rose

Literary Analysis of Robert Burns's A Red, Red Rose

Period of English Literature			18th Century England; The Age of Enlightenment; 1796
Historical Background			•      Robert Burns is often considered a writer ahead of his time, who often embraced the idea of using common language to reach the common person just slightly before this idea became popularized as the Age of Romanticism swept across the globe. •      When Burns published “A Red, Red Rose” in 1794, the Age of Enlightenment was dwindling to an end. •      Like the Romantics, he stressed emotion, not reason; were concerned with experiencing nature, not understanding it; and allowed for the possibility of an explicable, supernatural world •      His poetry demonstrates the Romantics’ faith in simple, common, accessible language is one of the ideas that was around before the movement in general took root. •      This treatment of time and beauty predicts the work of the later Romantic poets, who took Burns’s work as an important influence.
Type of Work (Form)			Ballad stanza Ballad: The ballad is an old form of verse adapted for singing or recitation, originating in the days when most poetry existed in spoken rather than written form. The typical subject matter of most ballads reflects folk themes important to common people: love, courage, the mysterious, and the supernatural. Though the ballad is generally rich in musical qualities such as rhythm and repetition, it often portrays both ideas and feelings in overwrought but simplistic terms.
Structure		Composition	·         Four four-line stanzas (or quatrains) ·         The first and third lines of each stanza have four stressed syllables, while the second and fourth lines have three stressed syllables.
Voice			First Person (My, I)
Subject			The speaker’s confession of love and passion to his lover.
Tone			Romantic and melancholy (a deep feeling of sadness)
Themes			·         The transient nature of beauty and love. ·         The delicate and fragile nature of beauty and love. ·         A meditation on the speaker’s consciousness of time and on limits that time can place upon human emotions.
Summary of Poem			The speaker compares his love first with a blooming rose in spring and then with a melody “sweetly play’d in tune.” If these similes seem the typical fodder for love-song lyricists, the second and third stanzas introduce the subtler and more complex implications of time. In trying to quantify his feelings—and in searching for the perfect metaphor to describe the “eternal” nature of his love—the speaker inevitably comes up against love’s greatest limitation, “the sands o’ life.” This image of the hour-glass forces the reader to reassess of the poem’s first and loveliest image: A “red, red rose” is itself an object of an hour, “newly sprung” only “in June” and afterward subject to the decay of time. This treatment of time and beauty predicts the work of the later Romantic poets, who took Burns’s work as an important influence.
Summary of  Lines 1-2			The reader may be already familiar with the poem’s much-quoted first line. Its appeal over time probably stems from the boldness of its assertion— the speaker’s love conveyed through the conventional image of the rose and through the line’s four strong beats. The poet’s choice of a rose may at first seem trite, and the color “red” may seem too obvious a symbol of love and passion. Yet if the comparison between the beloved and the rose verges on cliché, a careful reading reveals the subtler ways in which the speaker expresses his conviction. Why, for instance, is the word “red” repeated? The answer might be found in the second line. While red is the expected hue of the flower, the repetition of the adjective represents the fullest and most lovely manifestation of the rose: its ideal state. Such also is the nature of the speaker’s love. “Newly sprung,” it exists in its purest and most perfect state—none of its vitality has faded; time has not scarred it with age or decay. Yet this embodiment of love is a temporary one. Like the rose, which can exist in this lush form only “in June,” the speaker’s feelings and his beloved’s beauty cannot remain frozen in time: they, like all other forms of beauty, are passing.
Summary of  Lines 3-4			Perhaps it is the speaker’s recognition of the rose’s brief beauty that compels him to pursue another metaphor for his love. This time he chooses to compare her to a lovely melody from a song, but this is also a temporary form of beauty. While a song may be “sweetly play’d in tune,” it too is a product of time, of beats and measures. When the song has ended, its beauty lives on only in abstraction –as the idea of the beautiful song.
Summary of  Lines 5-8			The second stanza plays on the word “luve,” revealing the elusive nature of the concept. When the speaker says “I will luve thee still,” he plays on the concept of time. The line seems to indicate that the speaker will love continuously or forever, but the following line does put a limit on the amount of time he will love. His passion will continue “Till” a certain time – when “the seas   gang dry.” Though the prospect of the seas drying up seems remote, it exists nonetheless. Thus, while the sentiment seems wholly romantic, there remains in it a hint of melancholy: the speaker is saying his love will last a long time – but that it is not eternal in the purest sense.
Summary of  Lines 9-11			The repetition here of “Till a’ the seas gang dry” is in keeping with the song’s musicality. But in it there is also a hint of reconsideration, as if the speaker has just understood the implications of what he has said. From this, he moves to another attempt to express eternity, yet this too depends on the word “Till”: he will love until the rocks “melt wi’ the sun.” But the rocks may indeed melt one day, or erode, in any case, under the effects of the sun, wind, and weather. At that point that love will cease, so again, his sentiments are not wholly timeless.
Summary of  Line 12			Line 12 also casts some doubt on the speaker’s intentions, since it can be interpreted in two ways. In one sense, he could mean that their love is separate - above or beyond - the sands of time. This indicates that it will last forever and won’t change or end because of time. On the other hand, he almost seems to emphasize the fact that the sands are running, which is to say time is running out, as sand runs out of the hourglass. This direct reference to time also reminds us of the first two lines in the poem: the momentary, time-bound state of a “red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June.” Read in this way, the poem becomes more than the simple love ballad that it seemed initially; instead, it can also be seen as a meditation on the speaker’s consciousness of time and on limits that time can place upon human emotions.
Summary of  Lines 13-16			The last stanza seems to shift away from the predominant concerns of the first three: the speaker turns from the concept of time to that of parting. He is journeying away from his love, assuring her that he will be true and will return. Yet the concept of time enters here as well: the speaker will transcend not only a vast distance (“ten thousand miles”) to be with his love, but also time itself, with words like “awhile” and “again” drawing the poem back to the main concerns of the first three stanzas.
Imagery			A Red, Red Rose: Used to express passionate love. A melodie: Used to express the sweetness of his love. Seas and Rocks:  The speaker is saying his love will last a long time – but that is not eternal in the purest sense. Sands o’life:” The image of the hour-glass shows love’s greatest limitation: Time.
Language	Metaphor		·         “seas gang dry” and “ rocks melt wi' the sun” are both metaphors to describe the eternal nature of his love. ·         “the sands o’ life” demonstrates that time is running out, as sand runs out of the hourglass.
	Simile		·         The speaker compares his love first with a blooming rose in spring and then with a melody “sweetly play’d in tune.”

Read More

Grace Nichols The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping

The Guyanese-born poet Grace Nichols is among a growing network of Afra-Caribbean writers who
articulate their unique heritage of double colonization as women in a postcolonial community. Like Faybiene above, these women write in part to reject the social and mythological roles within which women in the Caribbean have long been confined, and in so doing to help loosen the sexual and economic constraints of women in their communities. As Faybiene insists, "When I lay sleeping in your rib / You called me no name // I am that I am"; these writers claim the Adamic role by naming themselves powerfully, attempting to crack the silence with which they have worn the names imposed by others. Moreover, as Faybiene names herself in words that echo the Judeo-Christian Yahweh's "I am who am," Afra-Caribbean poets may reforge myths that uncover the power of black women as queens, leaders, or goddesses. The poet and essayist Marlene Nourbese Philip emphasizes the special necessity of this project for the black female: "It is imperative that our writing begin to recreate our histories and our myths, as well as integrate that most painful of experiences - loss of our history and our world."(1) Grace Nichols uses such revisionary mythopoesis in her volume The Fat Black Woman's Poems to engender a new heroine, a woman who revises the esthetic of female beauty, challenges oppressive societal forces, and emerges as a powerful queen, founder, or goddess Like many Afra-Caribbean writers, Nichols infuses her poetry with the spiritual energy of the tradition of women before her, a tradition that has little written record. For although the strength of foremothers who were cultural protectors, social leaders, and family heads has recently been more widely examined (for example, by studies such as the 1995 Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective), it is a strength that has often been strategically hidden by women themselves or obscured by others who fear it. 

The Caribbean offers a particular challenge to the fashioner of a women's mythology. As Carol Boyce Davies reports, "In at least three categories of the earliest material available - the proverb, the folktale, and the major song form, the calypso(2) - woman's image is almost uniformly negative."(3) She cites a long list of images that demean women: "witch-spouses, gullible wives, dumb wives, unfaithful wives, wicked mothers, murderous mothers, cruel old women (hags, sorceresses, witches, soucoyants), vulnerable daughters, and almost no heroic women."(4) Strong women have thus been cast as evil or cruel, as the Obeah woman, for instance, often is. Until lately the one major exception to the negative image of women seems to be the often-invoked folk heroine, Grandy Nanny of the Maroons, called a "mytho/legendary ancestress"(5) and credited as being an excellent Obeah woman, healer, and military leader of a group of free blacks. Nanny's story begins with her importation to Jamaica from Africa as a slave, at which point she "rebelled and fled to the mountains from where she waged war against the British."(6) Lucille Mathurin Mair asserts that written records verify Nanny's status as a leader in the 1730s who made a reluctant peace in 1740 and got a patent in 1741 for land which her people still inhabit.(7) 

Though the heritage of this single female leader is necessarily limited, Grandy Nanny provides a valuable figure of resistance for the Afra-Caribbean writer who looks for mythological or literary models. Her myth is even more useful and poignant, perhaps, if we examine Nanny not only as a political rebel but also as a woman refusing to allow the colonization of her body through slavery and its attendant horrors of physical brutality and rape. Although Nanny is figured more often as a (grand)motherly (and hence stereotypically asexual) woman, contemporary knowledge exposes what was long recognized by victims and survivors: rape is not a violation reserved for the young and "sexy" woman only. The colonized woman's body is itself seen as a new world to be penetrated and harvested for sexual satisfaction and for the economic gain of children born into slavery. Nanny's escape is therefore not only a political rebellion but a flight to personal safety and control of her own body. In fact, her supernatural abilities are intimately tied to her body; it is said of Nanny that she could attract the bullets of the white soldiers to her buttocks where they were caught and rendered harmless!(8) She thus emerges as a precursor to the mythological woman (re)imagined by Nichols, who takes what Nourbese Philip has called "the inner space," the vulnerable female body, into ideological battle.(9) The body taken into battle may be fully loaded, to pun on that word, for, as Kadiatu Kanneh expresses it, "What is complicated is the simultaneity of suffering and power, marginalisation and threat, submission and narcissism, which accrue to Black and women's bodies and their representation in racist cultures."(10) As Nichols also realizes, the body is a site on which numerous linguistic and social constructions place their foundations. 

With the radical body of Nanny as a precursor, Grace Nichols turns to the process of mythopoesis to create another similarly vital and rebellious woman in her poetry, a woman who can stand alongside Nanny as founding mother. I will examine here the first section of Nichols's volume The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984), in which the title character is metamorphosed from a figure of ridicule or a representative of the Jemima stereotype into a self-celebrating quasi-goddess. Nichols's powerful writing has received little critical attention, and most has concentrated on her volume i is a long memoried woman, winner of the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In that volume Nichols leads the reader through an archetypal Afra-Caribbean woman's history, from African to slave and mother to revolutionary victor, painting the portrait of a woman who suffers, dreams, works, loves, triumphs, and ultimately gains "the power to be what I am / a woman / charting my own futures."(11) As Gabriele Griffin says of that volume, "Nichols's Black woman uses her body, her voice, her song to maintain her sense of selfhood, to support others and to subvert the structures that oppress her."(12) 

While the same could be said of the poet's next volume, the verses collected in The Fat Black Woman's Poems take on a more contemporary frame and also assume a certain playfulness in their remythologizing, what Nichols describes as "a sheer sense of fun, of having the fat black woman doing exactly as she pleases . . . taking a satirical, tongue-in-cheek look at the world."(13) As the title announces, it is a book in which the racialized and "weighed" body is of foremost importance. Recuperating the body signals as well the recuperation of identity; as Bryan Turner explains, "The body is an important surface on which the marks of social status, family position, tribal affiliation, age, gender, and religious condition can easily and publicly be displayed."(14) Nichols redefines the standards of beauty which exclude the fat black woman and, perhaps most radically, posits the fat black woman as herself a sort of colonizer, a founding mother of a new civilization, a new Eve, and even a creator-goddess, at the close of this sequence.

شرح اخر                                         

Grace Nichols, ‘The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping’

Shopping in London winter
is a real drag for the fat black woman
going from store to store
in search of accommodating clothes
and de weather so cold
Look at the frozen thin mannequins
fixing her with grin
and de pretty face salesgals
exchanging slimming glances
thinking she don’t notice
Lord is aggravating
Nothing soft and bright and billowing
to flow like breezy sunlight
when she walking
The fat black woman curses in Swahili/Yoruba
and nation language under her breathing
all this journeying and journeying
The fat black woman could only conclude
that when it come to fashion
the choice is lean
Nothing much beyond size 14

Analysis:

It seems like that our poet is using her sarcastic sense of humour to complain about the difficulties in finding clothes of her size in cold winter in London.  However, it is clear that London does not sell clothes of her size although she is a British.  Moreover, sales girls are making fun of her appearance. 

Language:

Nichols’ language is colloquial which sounds like a daily conversation.  It is also dramatic and jaunty which is close to Stevie Smith’s ‘the jungle husband’.  She deliberately typed ‘de’ instead ‘the’, labelled her identity (diction).

Techniques:

Rhyming: the frequent use of whispering, sibilant words like ‘sh’, ‘s’ created an unpleasant atmosphere and produced a reflectively regretful tone that almost masks the anger.

Also, the repeated use of ‘ing’, ‘in’, ‘b’ effectively conveyed her mind state.  Angry but she is trying to put it under the control.  Negative feelings come from prejudice and discrimination in terms of sizes, cold weather and pretty face salesgals’ slimming glances but she is still trying to ignore and stay positive.

Repetition:

Fat black woman appeared 3 times in this poem.  Her image is impressive, as I would like to think that she represents black women in the UK.

'Store to store’ is responding to ‘journeying to journeying’, effectively delivering the sad truth is that she lives in London but it does not sell clothes of her size.  In a cold winter, she must have worn a lot in order to keep warm but as stores don’t have her size, her clothes may look outdated and perhaps shabby.  The reality made her feel sick, exhausted and tired.

Journeying to journeying may offer a double meaning which renders the fact that racial prejudice and discrimination has existed in London for a long time, and ridiculously, this journey has no end. 

Her conclusion is polite and sarcastic, open to multiple interpretations.  Of course, poet just chose fashion as a window to articulate discrimination but it is not limited to fashion…

Read More