Its further multiple meanings include the image of luxury we associate with the bed of roses, and the idea of the unexpected blessing that makes a difficult life worth living. Then again, the rose is nothing without its thorns, an attribute that helps to generate a whole series of moral lessons about how it is necessary to accept the arduous side of life in order to enjoy its fleeting rewards.

Marlowe

The twin ideas of love and luxury are intertwined in Christopher Marlowe’s love lyric of 1599, "The Passionate Shepherd To His Love".

The speaker promises his beloved all the bounty of nature if she will only “Come live with me, and be my love”.

    And I will make thee beds of roses
    And a thousand fragrant posies;
    A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
    Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

The bed of roses is the proverbial situation of ease or comfort, and stands for the lover’s desire to guarantee the object of his affections as untroubled a life as possible. With her floral headgear and myrtle-leaf gown, she will lounge about on heaps of petals all day.

Shakespeare

Perhaps the single most famous rose quote in literature comes from Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet (1594-5). Lamenting the eternal state of war between her family and Romeo’s, Juliet reflects that if he were only to shed the despised Montague name and call himself something else, none of it would matter.

    What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
    By any other name would smell as sweet.
    So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
    Retain that dear perfection which he owes
    Without that title…        (Act II, scene ii)

The point has bothered linguistic philosophers ever since. Would we still love the rose and its scent if it were better known as the deadly stinkweed? Tellingly though, Juliet makes her point by singling out the most universally admired flower in the garden, to which to compare her frankly perfect Romeo, thus telling us as much about the rose as she does about her secret boyfriend.


The rose crops up again in one of the poet’s sonnets to his own boyfriend, and we are reminded that it is the rose’s fragrance that is as much a part of its seductive qualities as its gorgeous appearance:

    O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
    By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
    The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
    For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
    The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
    As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
    Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
    When summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses:
    But, for their virtue only is their show,
    They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;
    Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
    Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:
    And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
    When that shall vade, my verse distills your truth.
                                (Sonnet 54)

The metaphor of the rose depends upon an unfavourable comparison of the scentless wild rose or dog rose (“canker blooms”, as they were known in Elzabethan times) with the sweetly fragrant garden rose. The scent of the latter rose is the true mark of its beauty, and stands for the inner qualities of the “lovely youth”, namely his “truth”. Nobody prizes the dog rose, which is all outward show, but the true rose outlives itself, in that its petals can be used to make intensely fragrant rosewater, used as a perfume and to flavour sweets: “Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made.” Similarly, when the boy’s own youthful beauty fades, what will be left is his inner truthfulness, the essence of his virtue.

A good handful of the sonnets return to this image of the rose, but the image is always more complicated than saying “A rose is beautiful, and so are you”. We are aware that it fades, and that its folded petals seem to be harbouring some kind of secret not visible to the casual glance.

Read more about Shakespeare and his contemporaries here.

Herrick

The 17th-century lyric poet Robert Herrick picks up this theme in his most celebrated lines, which form the opening stanza of "To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time" (1648). The lesson of the poem is that time is fleeting, everything changes, and we should enjoy what blessings we have while we have them (including taking advantage of an offer of marriage).

    Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old Time is still a-flying;
    And this same flower that smiles today
    Tomorrow will be dying.

Blake

By the following century, this theme of the rose’s fragility takes on overtones of moral ambiguity, especially in the work of William Blake. In the short lyric, "The Sick Rose", one of the Songs Of Experience (1794), the emblematic flower is ailing:

    O Rose thou art sick. 
    The invisible worm, 
    That flies in the night 
    In the howling storm:
  
    Has found out thy bed 
    Of crimson joy: 
    And his dark secret love
    Does thy life destroy.

An infection-bearing worm has got into the flowerbed and poisoned the rose, which is now dying. The poem is a tautly concentrated observation about sexual love, attitudes to which were one of the poisonous elements of the society in which he lived, in Blake’s view. The “bed” is at once the flowerbed and the amorous bed, and that “invisible worm” a fairly obvious image of the male sexual organ that only “flies in the night” under cover of prudish darkness, albeit in the “howling storm” of sexual union.


In “My Pretty Rose Tree”, another of the Songs Of Experience, the male lover turns down the offer of sexual favours because he already has a partner, but the existing affair withers as a result of jealousy on the part of the woman.

    A flower was offered to me,
    Such a flower as May never bore;
    But I said, ‘I’ve a pretty rose tree,’
    And I passed the sweet flower o’er.

    Then I went to my pretty rose tree,
    To tend her by day and by night;
    But my rose turned away with jealousy,
    And her thorns were my only delight.

Critics have speculated as to whether this poem refers to some specific incident in the poet’s life, or whether it is a generalised observation about the inconstancy of the human heart.

Read more about William Blake here.