Women and Roses

I.



I dream of a red-rose tree.

And which of its roses three

Is the dearest rose to me?



II.



Round and round, like a dance of snow

In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go

Floating the women faded for ages,

Sculptured in stone, on the poet's pages.

Then follow women fresh and gay,

Living and loving and loved to-day.

Last, in the rear, flee the multitude of maidens,

Beauties yet unborn. And all, to one cadence,

They circle their rose on my rose tree.



III.



Dear rose, thy term is reached,

Thy leaf hangs loose and bleached:

Bees pass it unimpeached.



IV.



Stay then, stoop, since I cannot climb,

You, great shapes of the antique time!

How shall I fix you, fire you, freeze you,

Break my heart at your feet to please you?

Oh, to possess and be possessed!

Hearts that beat 'neath each pallid breast!

Once but of love, the poesy, the passion,

Drink but once and die!---In vain, the same fashion,

They circle their rose on my rose tree.



V.

Dear rose, thy joy's undimmed,

Thy cup is ruby-rimmed,

Thy cup's heart nectar-brimmed.



VI.



Deep, as drops from a statue's plinth

The bee sucked in by the hyacinth,

So will I bury me while burning,

Quench like him at a plunge my yearning,

Eyes in your eyes, lips on your lips!

Fold me fast where the cincture slips,

Prison all my soul in eternities of pleasure,

Girdle me for once! But no---the old measure,

They circle their rose on my rose tree.



VII.



Dear rose without a thorn,

Thy bud's the babe unborn:

First streak of a new morn.



VIII.



Wings, lend wings for the cold, the clear!

What is far conquers what is near.

Roses will bloom nor want beholders,

Sprung from the dust where our flesh moulders.

What shall arrive with the cycle's change?

A novel grace and a beauty strange.

I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her,

Shaped her to his mind!---Alas! in like manner

They circle their rose on my rose tree.

Notes on "Women and Roses"

Robert Browning (1812-1889) was not a love poet as such. For the most part, he wrote historical and narrative poems and various experimental poetry in the form of dramatic monologues. His romantic courtship and secret marriage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning made him a celebrated figure of romantic love poetry however. This poem, Women and Roses, was part of Men and Women, a book of 51 poems written in Italy and published in 1855, after he had married Elizabeth Barrett. The book helped to repair his reputation, which had been suffered at the hands of critics in 1840 when he published Sordello.

Women and roses is about perfect love - finding a rose with no thorns. Need one add that Browning makes use of the classic poetic link between womanhood and flowers - especially roses?

A university of Southern California exhibit highlights poems and pictures  inspired by the theme "Roses" in poetry, including the one shown above. The exhibit (not online it seems) is described thus:

A selection of famous rose poems is displayed, including Browning's "Women and Roses" in Dorothy Stemler's copy of the poet's work. The rose has been a frequent or pervasive symbol in world poetry from "la rosa sempiterna" of Dante to Eliot's "burnt roses" in "Little Gidding." Indeed, as the semiotician (and rose novelist!), Umberto Eco noted: "the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meaning that by now it hardly has any meaning left: Dante's mystic rose, and go lovely rose, the Wars of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose by any other name, a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicrucians" (Reflections on the Name of the Rose. London, 1983. p. 3). Eco's own best known work, the title decorations of which have been borrowed here as bookmarks, closes with the 12th century lines of Bernard of Morlay:
stat rosa pristina nomine nomina nuda tenemus
the rose stays fresh in its name we have only the name

"La Rosa", "Una Rosa y Milton", and "Rosas" are from Obra Poetica of Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, 1967).

A literature database (LION) contains the texts of 1161 poems on roses. Among these are works by Blake, both Brownings, Burns, Clare, Coleridge, Cowper, Dickinson, Dunbar, Gay, Herbert, Herrick, Keats, Landor, Vachel Lindsay, James Lowell, Lytton, Melville, Thomas Moore, Morris, Nesbit, Riley, Rossetti, Shakespeare, Shelley, Southey, Spenser, Stevenson, Swinburne, Tennyson, Whittier, and Wordsworth (a longer list of these poets and their rose poems is appended to this guide to the exhibit). More recent authors who have used the rose theme include Kenneth Patchen, Dorothy Parker, Doris Lessing, and Tennessee Williams.

A painting of Elizabeth I, the "Rose Queen," has in its upper left corner an image of the Tudor Rose, which, in its stylized petals, reconciled the old rose rivalries of York (white) and Lancaster (red), a conflict dramatised in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 1 (reproduced from Michael Gibson's Book of the Rose (London, 1980), p.32-35.

An illumination from a Flemish manuscript (c.1500) of Le Roman de La Rose (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung) appears in several of the donated rose books. The one shown is from The Rose (New York, 1979). The facsimile of the Kelmscott Chaucer Romaunt of the Rose shows a Burnes-Jones' illustration framed by a complex interwoven Morris rose design. (UCSC's copy: PR 1850.1958). In Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science, there is an elegant essay contrasting the rose of the scientist and the rose of the poet. (UCSC's copy: PN55.H8).

Robert Browning (1812-1889) was a prolific poet of the victorian age. He did not achieve fame, however, until relatively late in life. His unconventional style and experimentation tended to confuse Victorian readers. His fascination with horror tales is in some ways reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. He is perhaps most famous today for his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett. He published a volume that included love poems, Men and Women, in 1855. Some of these poems were later recognized as masterpieces. His 20,000 line The Ring and the Book published in 1868 and 1869, was evidently inspired by Elizabeth Barrett, and achieved the fame that had eluded him earlier.