Oh My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns: The Power of Long-lasting Love

In “Oh my love is like a red, red rose” by Robert Burns, the poem centralizes a man’s expressive, lasting love for someone. The theme of this poem conveys the power of long-lasting love and how it may affect a person’s feelings. In this case, falling in love tends to provoke thoughts to be only centered around a significant other. Throughout the poem, let us analyze Burns’ lines and experience a man’s deep love for his female companion.

Traditionally in a Scottish song form, Burns shows a common iambic meter with four-lined stanzas, known as quatrains. The rhyme follows ABCB scheme for the first two stanzas, followed by ABAB scheme for the last two stanzas. Starting with the title, “Oh, my love is like a red, red rose”, readers can interpret so much meaning through the use of simile and imagery. When thinking of love, one of the many thoughts would be associate to a red rose. Roses are a symbol of love, desire, lust, passion and even a new beginning (since roses, like any flower, bloom into a beautiful, vibrant flower). While rose may be the first word readers are captivated by, love is another word that draws attention. Love, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, “is strong feeling or affection”, or “a person or thing that one loves”. As any reader would know, love can be expressed in writing, such as songs, notes, ballads, sonnets or poems. In this case, Burns raises the true definition of expressing love in poetry.

The first line opens with a simile: “Oh, my love is like a red, red rose ”, the poet compares his love of a woman with a rose, the most iconic symbol of love and beauty. By starting out the poem with “Oh”, it creates a more dramatic or hyperbolic, statement in which the speaker is yearning for his lover. Without the addition of an “Oh” at the beginning of the sentence, the poem would not be seen as dramatic as it could potentially be said from the speaker. Burns uses repetition of “red” twice in this line to echo his everlasting love for a woman to a rose’s vibrancy. Despite the popular belief of a rose traditionally being associated to red, the color is confirmed to represent “deep love, passion, or desire”.

Lastly, the appearance of an alliteration “red” and “rose” shows a romantic and passionate tone, since the letter r rolls off the tongue. Lastly, notice that the word rose is in singular form, accentuating one rose connotates the meaning to be for one woman. Diction, in this line, signifies the affection being shown to the narrator’s lover. As readers transition into the second line, it follows with an image of a rose “That’s newly sprung in June ”. Generally, roses do not bloom in the summer, however the rose that Burns mentions here is the dog rose that only blooms in the summer. You see, Burns is personifying a red rose to the speaker’s blooming love that is appeared as fresh and new. He follows this with another simile, stating “My Love is like the melody / That’s sweetly played in tune ”. The effective use of two similes in one stanza demonstrates the speaker’s intense love, in which he shows a comparison to a song or melody. Generally speaking, a song’s purpose is to make the audience feel better through the unique lyrics and sounds being heard. Therefore, comparing a person’s love to a song describes the feeling of being happy when listening to it with someone special. Thus, Burns is comparing love to a euphonic song that idealizes the speaker’s fullness of love. After that, the poet does not add any more similes, perhaps to simply introduce the overall tone of the poem to be affectionate and joyful.

In the second stanza, the speaker says “o fair art thou, my bonny lass”, shifting from expressing his own feelings to acknowledging his “bonnie lass” as “fair” or beautiful. As many people do not know what “bonny lass”, Oxford Dictionary defines this unique Scottish word as “a beautiful or attractive woman”, accentuating the speaker’s charming words to compliment his lover. The diction in this line is quite different, as the audience may expect, since Burns lived in the eighteenth century, thus his words pertain to that time period (hence the words like “art” and “thou”. After his compliment, the speaker returns to the amount of which he is in deep love by saying “So deep in love am I / And I will love thee still, my dear”. The diction is important to note here, since “ love” is being used as a verb here, rather than a noun in the first line. This emphasizes that he is talking about the woman he cherishes and cares for. The distinction between this may indicate that the woman is more important than the idea of “love”, conveying his expression of emotions due to his beloved. In addition to that, Burns uses the words “my dear” and “my bonny lass” to demonstrate an effective use of apostrophe of the speaker’s lover to be as meaningful as what she is being compared to. Burns ends this stanza with the speaker declaring his love to last “Till a’ the seas gang dry”. Gang, here, means “to go or proceed”. So, the speaker is saying his love for this woman will continue forever, until the seas end up dry, which is unlikely to occur, implying that he is certain that it will last long. The amount of passion and assertiveness that the speaker projects creates another level of love by repeating and stressing his devotion for his love is not like any other type of love he has ever experienced.

In the next stanza, Burns repeats “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear” to address his lover, this time, and exaggerate how much speaker will love only her. Through the use of repetition, the speaker is ensuring that his lover should understand how long his affection will last — stressing how important it is to convey his message across. He follows after with “And the rocks melt wi’ the sun”. This line is a continuation of the last line, in which he is gives another life-ending scenario to emphasize that he won’t leave her, even if life will end. This stanza is clear in showing hyperboles to indicate that his love for her will never diminish, as repeatedly denoted in the eleventh line: “And I will love thee still, my dear”. This time, he speaks of his dearly beloved in a different perspective by utilizing the word “thee”, or in this case, you to greater impact of targeting the only person he talks about. As he ends the last line of the stanza with “while the sands o’ life shall run”, he, once again, hyperbolizes that he will love her until the end of life. This particular line is the most interesting to point out, because it metaphorizes an hourglass, hinting at the amount of time he has left to live, as a unique measurement of time and life. Out of all the stanzas, this one effectively depicts the speaker’s desperate affection to his beloved. In the final stanza, the narrator addresses his lady again, “And fare thee weel, my only love! / And fare thee weel awhile”. Burns uses repetition quite often in this poem, especially in the last stanza, he repeats “And fare thee weel” —once to say farewell, twice to address the lover’s presence. To further analyze the meaning, the speaker is saying that no matter how far he or she will be, it will be ephemeral until he returns for a life surrounded by their love. Connecting that to the last two lines, the speaker says “And I will come again, my love / Though it were ten thousand mile”. The repetitive use of words such as “my only love”, “my dear”, and other addresses to the woman illustrates a specific mode of poetry to be a dramatic monologue, since Burns purposefully utilizes repetition and apostrophe of the unknown lover, who never spoke in the whole poem, Notice that Burns repeats “my love” again, but without an exclamation — highlighting a calmer tone of reassurance. Instead of screaming “my love” in the thirteenth line, the speaker feels content towards his actions and knows that he will come back to her because he is deeply in love with her, hence the entirety of the poem. The purpose of using a hyperbolic statement such as “ten thousand mile” was important in understanding the speaker’s desire to stay connected to his love, no matter how far away the distance may be. By the end of the poem, readers sense the speaker’s affections to endure forever, stressing that the importance of love is immeasurable in that it plays a vital role in understanding the theme of this poem.

Overall, the poem displays affection in another way: through emotion and diction to express one’s affection to someone. Burns effectively expressed the speaker’s deep love with repetition, hyperbole, diction, and imagery. He also adds words like “my dear”, “my love”, and “my bonny lass” to emphasize the narrator’s sole love for this woman. The use of images such as the world ending with the sun’s flames, the oceans’ bare land, and the dying of old age and time are among the situations, Burns applies things that could potentially make the character no longer love his beloved; however, in actuality, it strengthens the speaker’s meaning and devotion of love.

Works Cited

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