Lesson 36
THE FIRST READING
1.) What is the occasion of the poem? What literary device does the poet employ? Describe what you know of the speaker, the listener, and the “she” referred to in the poem.
This poem is about a young man courting a young woman. The poet uses envoy in this poem because the man asks the rose to go and talk to this woman for him. There isn’t a lot revealed about the speaker, other than the fact that he really likes this lady. The woman he likes is modest, and we know this because the narrator says, “And not blush so to be admired” We know he is speaking to a rose because in the first line of the poem he says, “Go lovely Rose”

2.) Paraphrase each of the four stanzas.
I am sending you (the rose) to the woman I love who won’t decide whether or not she loves me. Your beauty will show her how beautiful I think she is. Tell this modest lady that if you had bloomed in a desert, no one would have ever discovered your beauty. Beauty that can’t be seen is worthless. So ask her to show herself and let herself be wanted, instead of being embarrassed about it. Then die so she understands that the beauty of a woman and a rose doesn’t last very long.

3.) I’m not really sure how to describe the meter or it’s “substitutions”, I don’t understand how you can have a certain type of meter and then substitute whatever you want into it, and even if I did understand that I couldn’t tell which type it was in this poem. I think that the rhyme scheme and stanza form help reveal the author’s message the best. The rhyme scheme is ababb for all four stanzas and each of the four stanzas consists of one sentence alone. The similar rhyme scheme and the similar format of all the stanzas make the tone of the author the same with each statement. In every stanza he is telling the rose what to do, “Go” (1), “Tell her” (6), “Bid her” (13) “Then die” (16).

THE SECOND READING
1.) Consider first Herbert’s us of metaphor and personification. In each case, what two unlike things are being compared, and what do they have in common?
The use of personification and metaphor are important to the understanding of this poem. The first metaphor compares the day to the marriage of the earth and sky in lines 1 and 2. The other metaphor is at the end of the poem, it compares a timber to the soul of a virtuous person, implying that when all others fall around it, it will remain glorious. In the second line of the poem the dew is personified as a weeping person that is crying because the day is going to end. The another example of personification in this poem is when the rose is personified as being able to make a man wipe his eye. The final example of personification compares spring to a box of perfumes but it doesn’t last very long.

2.) How is the poem structured, and how does this structure supports its meaning? Consider parallelism, order, and the turn in the poem.
The poem is four stanzas long and each stanza is one sentence long. There are three different personified subjects in each in their own stanza. They are all “sweet” but they also all die, no matter how long they can survive. The last stanza presents the exception, the “virtuous soul” doesn’t die, and it is very sweet indeed.

3.) How does the prosody reinforce the poem’s meaning?
The prosody of the poem enhances its meaning because of the structures of the stanzas. The first 3 stanza are all similar because they all share similar rhyming sounds at the end of their lines. The last stanza has two completely different rhyming sounds at the end of each line, and that helps emphasize that the virtuous soul will never die like the other three sweet things (day, rose, spring) that all “must die”