Literary Analysis of Robert Burns's A Red, Red Rose
Period of English Literature
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18th Century England; The Age of Enlightenment; 1796
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Historical Background
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• 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.
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Type of Work (Form)
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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.
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Structure
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Composition
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· 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.
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Voice
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First Person (My, I)
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Subject
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The speaker’s confession of love and passion to his lover.
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Tone
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Romantic and melancholy (a deep feeling of sadness)
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Themes
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· 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.
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Summary of Poem
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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.
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Summary of Lines 1-2
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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.
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Summary of Lines 3-4
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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.
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Summary of Lines 5-8
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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.
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Summary of Lines 9-11
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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.
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Summary of Line 12
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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.
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Summary of Lines 13-16
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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.
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Imagery
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Language
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Metaphor
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· “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.
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Simile
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· The speaker compares his love first with a blooming rose in spring and then with a melody “sweetly play’d in tune.”
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