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    A Study Guide for Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose"
    A Study Guide for Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose"
    A Study Guide for Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose"
    Ebook28 pages19 minutes

    A Study Guide for Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535817127
    A Study Guide for Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose" - Gale

      1

      A Red, Red Rose

      Robert Burns

      1794

      Introduction

      After the 1786 publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Robert Burns spent the last ten years of his life collecting and editing songs for The Scots Musical Museum, an anthology intended to preserve traditional Scottish lyrical forms. During this time, Burns also composed more than three hundred original works for the volume, songs that relied heavily on forms and sentiments popular in the folk culture of the Scottish peasantry. A Red, Red Rose, first published in 1794 in A Selection of Scots Songs, edited by Peter Urbani, is one such song. Written in ballad stanzas, the verse—read today as a poem—pieces together conventional ideas and images of love in a way that transcends the low or non-literary sources from which the poem is drawn. In it, 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

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