The importance of literature terms

Introduction

Conclusion

OH MY LOVE IS LIKE A RED ROSE BY ROBERT BURNS ANALYSIS

Oh my Love is like a Red Rose by Robert Burns Analysis

Oh my Love is like a Red Rose by Robert Burns Analysis

Introduction

Burns Love songs and their beautiful tunes are particularly memorable. The Lea Rig and Corn Rigs are Bonie celebrate the bitter-sweetness of first assignations and the joys of sexual meeting. Mary Morison, Ae Fond Kiss and Highland Mary are songs of parting and death suffused with the poet's sense of mortality. These intimations of inevitable ending invade love lyrics such as Red, Rose and O Wert thou in the Cauld Blast whilst John Anderson was rewritten as an expression of simple companionship between aging lovers. The final song to Clarinda, written in 1791, is among the masterpieces of its kind. In it, with the skill so characteristic of his love poetry at its best, he reduces everything to one basic and overpowering emotion, the emotion of having loved and now having to part. Sir Walter Scott remarked, in reference to the four last lines of the second stanza this contains the essence of a thousand love tales and furthermore that one verse is worth a thousand romances. They are more than that though, they are, in themselves a complete romance. The Alpha and Omega of feeling and contain the essence of an existence of pain and pleasure distilled into one burning drop (Burns, 15).

Oh my Love is like a Red Rose by Robert Burns Analysis

This song is truly Burns own hand, every line has produced a rush of traditioners who pretend to treat us with what they call the old words. To all lovers of Burns and to the great mass of romantic souls the rose newly sprung in June provides us with perfect imagery. Burns imagination and his ear gathered these inherited comparisons and metaphors together, altered them, however slightly, purged them of all vulgarity and created in the end one of the loveliest lyrics of all time. It is a masterpiece of technique rather than of passion. It is by the superb blending of the various units into one harmonious whole that the song achieves its beauty (Burns, 15).

In a Red Rose, traditional similes and comparisons perform a serious function. The rose, the melody, the drying seas, the melting rocks and sands are symbolic. My love is like a red, red, rose. At the same time the reader feels that they are not merely physical objects of the ordinary kind, but draw their evocative power from all the roses that young girls have ever been compared to, and from age old prophecies that someday the seas will evaporate and the earth be consumed in some enormous conflagration. We can speak of these images only if we are willing to define them as the concentrated experiences and feelings of many generations, organised by language and handed down and it is from socially transmitted emotional patterns of this sort that Burns song ...