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The Full Text of “A Red, Red Rose”
1O my Luve is like a red, red rose
2 That’s newly sprung in June;
3O my Luve is like the melody
4 That’s sweetly played in tune.
5So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
6 So deep in luve am I;
7And I will luve thee still, my dear,
8 Till a’ the seas gang dry.
9Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
10 And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
11I will love thee still, my dear,
12 While the sands o’ life shall run.
13And fare thee weel, my only luve!
14 And fare thee weel awhile!
15And I will come again, my luve,
16 Though it were ten thousand mile.
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“A Red, Red Rose” Introduction
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“A Red, Red Rose” is a poem composed by Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns. It was first published in 1794 in a collection of traditional Scottish songs set to music. Burns’s poem was inspired both by a simple Scots song he had heard in the country and by published ballads from the period. The poem has the form of a ballad and is meant to be sung aloud. It describes the speaker’s deep love for his or her beloved and promises that this love will last longer than human life and even the planet itself, remaining fresh and constant forever.
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“A Red, Red Rose” Summary
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The speaker describes his or her love—meaning either the person the speaker loves or the speaker's feelings of love for that person—as being as beautiful, vivid, and fresh as a flower that has just recently bloomed. This love is as sweet as a beautiful song played by a skilled musician.
The beloved is so beautiful that the speaker loves her with a deep and strong passion—so strong, in fact, that the speaker's love will last until the oceans have become dry.
Even after the seas have evaporated and the earth has decayed, the speaker will still love the beloved. This love will endure until their own lives have ended and even until all human life has ended.
The speaker concludes by saying goodbye to the beloved—who is, the speaker reminds her, the only person the speaker loves. The speaker wishes her well during their temporary separation. The speaker reaffirms his or her faithful love by promising to return even if the journey covers a very long distance and takes a very long time.
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“A Red, Red Rose” Themes
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Love and Change
“A Red, Red Rose” begins by describing the speaker’s love for a beloved with images that are beautiful but not necessarily long-lasting. The speaker then affirms, however, that his or her love will outlast human life itself. Through the speaker’s paradoxical (but passionate) claims, the poem argues that true love is both constantly renewing and completely unchangeable.
The speaker begins by describing love in terms that are beautiful but that don’t immediately suggest permanence. The first lines compare the speaker’s love to “a red, red rose.” “Luve” could refer to the beloved, the person the speaker loves. It could also refer to the speaker’s feelings for this person. Saying the beloved is like a rose “newly sprung in June” emphasizes her beauty and youth. Meanwhile, saying that the speaker’s love for her is like a new rose implies that this is a new relationship, with all the freshness and excitement of a developing romance. Of course, a rose can only be “newly sprung” for a short time; June ends after thirty days, and flowers fade quickly. If the speaker’s love is just like a new rose, maybe it won’t last very long.
The speaker then says this love is like “a melody / That’s sweetly played in tune.” But again, instruments can go out of tune, just as flowers can fade. The newness and excitement of the speaker’s love initially make it seem somewhat unstable.
Then, however, the speaker goes on to emphasize how long this love will last. The speaker uses three images to measure how long these feelings of love will last: the seas going dry, the rocks melting, and the sands of life running out. These events could only occur after eons of time, if ever. It seems now that the speaker’s love, far from lasting only as long as a flower, will actually endure longer than human life. Although these conflicting descriptions of the speaker’s love sound like a paradox, the speaker continues to insist that true love really can embody these seemingly opposite qualities of newness and permanence.
In the final stanza, the speaker bids farewell to the beloved, as if the speaker is planning to leave on a journey. The beloved doesn’t need to worry, though, because the speaker promises to return, even if the journey is “ten thousand mile[s]” long. This promise implies that, just as long stretches of time could not exhaust the speaker’s love for the beloved, a long stretch of distance cannot keep the speaker from her. And the length of this journey now seems short—just “awhile”—compared to the near-infinite time the speaker’s love will last. It seems, then, that love like the speaker’s is powerful enough to make earthly obstacles (like physical distance) feel insignificant. That is, this love is reliable and constant, but it also feels fresh and exciting enough to adapt to changed circumstances. The moment of farewell in the final stanza highlights the speaker’s core argument: love that lasts forever is also love that allows for change over time.
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Beauty, Youth, and Aging
“A Red, Red Rose” initially suggests that the speaker’s love is generated by the beloved’s youth and beauty—qualities that fade with time. The speaker then affirms, however, that these temporary qualities actually give rise to feelings that persist eternally, through aging and even through death. The poem seems to argue that beauty and youth are so powerful that they can inspire feelings that last long after these qualities themselves are gone.
The speaker begins with an image of the beloved that emphasizes her youth and beauty, suggesting a love that is enthusiastic but likely to fade with time. The speaker tells the reader that this love “like a red, red rose.” Roses are most beautiful when “newly sprung”—but this is a beauty that, by definition, cannot last. Newness ends quickly, and all flowers eventually fade—they cannot be “red, red” forever. If “my Luve” refers to the beloved, then comparing her to a rose acknowledges that she is beautiful now but that her beauty will fade over time. Or, if “my Luve” refers to the speaker’s feelings for her, then it seems that the speaker’s feelings may also fade over time.
As the poem continues, however, the speaker suggests that the impermanent qualities of youth and beauty give rise to a love that is permanent. The speaker’s love will remain constant even through aging, decay, and death. In the second stanza, the speaker affirms the beloved’s beauty—“So fair art thou”—and the speaker’s strong love for her—“So deep in luve am I.” The parallel phrases starting with "So" suggest a causal connection between the two ideas. It is because she is so beautiful, as beautiful as a rose, that the speaker’s feelings for her are so strong. They are so strong, in fact, that they will last longer than any rose. Somewhat counterintuitively, the poem claims that the speaker’s love will actually outlast the rose-like beauty that initially inspired it.
To indicate how long he or she will love the beloved, the speaker uses three images: the sea going dry, the rocks melting with the sun, and the sands of life running out. These images represent great lengths of time (it would take an eternity for these events to happen) and, crucially, also describe processes of decay. They show the natural world losing its vitality and form, in much the same way as an individual flower would. Through these images, the speaker is indirectly confronting the reality of aging and death—not just in the natural world, but also in the lives of this couple. The speaker implies that he or she will continue to love the beloved even as she ages and her beauty decays. That is, her beautiful appearance may have first inspired their love, but their love will endure even when her beauty is gone. It will last, in fact, until the sands of their lives have run out and they draw close to death.
When the speaker promises to return after a long journey, knowing the beloved will have aged in that time, the speaker reaffirms that his or her feelings will remain the same even though the beloved may grow less beautiful. The speaker concludes by bidding farewell to the beloved and promising to return to her, even if the journey is “ten thousand mile[s]” long. The beloved will likely be older, less youthful, and perhaps less beautiful by the time the speaker returns. Nevertheless, the speaker does promise to return, indicating that although the beloved may change, the speaker’s feelings will remain constant. Through the final promise, the poem indicates again that the love youthful beauty inspires need not end when youth itself ends.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Red, Red Rose”
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Lines 1-2
O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;The speaker begins by using a simile to compare his or her "luve" to a rose (the unfamiliar spelling here is just part of the poem's Scottish dialect). "Luve" here could actually have two meanings. It could refer either to the beloved (that is, the person the speaker loves), or to the speaker's feelings of love for this person. Comparing the beloved to a rose emphasizes her youth and beauty, while comparing the speaker's emotions to a rose emphasizes how intense, exciting, and new those feelings are.
The rose is also a key symbol in the poem, in two different ways. On the one hand, the rose is an ancient symbol of love in many cultures, including in Western literature. Different colors of roses have different symbolic significance; the color red is associated with true love. By using this common image to describe his or her love, the speaker frames the experience of love in universal terms, inviting the readers to recall their own experiences of love as a way to understand the speaker's.
The rose has another significance besides love, however. Flowers often symbolize impermanence, since they are so short lived. A "newly sprung" rose is especially short lived since its newness, by definition, lasts only a short time. Instead of symbolizing the intensity of the speaker's love, then, the rose may possibly signify that these feelings of love may only last a little while. The reader must continue through the rest of the poem to see which interpretation of the rose is the correct one.
The first two lines also establish the poem's meter, which is alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter (meaning lines alternate between have four and three iambs—poetic feet with a da DUM syllable rhythm—per line):
O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in JuneThe poem follows this meter throughout, though with some irregularities. In the first line, for instance, there is an additional syllable the start of the line for the interjection "O." There is also a spondee with the words "red, red," which can be read as both being stressed. The spondee, like the repetition of "red" and the alliteration of "red, red, rose," emphasizes the brightness and vividness of the color of the rose by emphasizing the sound of the phrase.
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Lines 3-4
O my Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
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Lines 5-8
So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry. -
Lines 9-12
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run. -
Lines 13-16
And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.
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“A Red, Red Rose” Symbols
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Rose
The rose is a traditional symbol of romantic love, especially when its color is red. Here, the rose symbolizes the love between the speaker and the beloved. This traditional symbolism dates back to ancient Greek literature, which associated the rose with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. In one ancient myth, roses became red when Aphrodite wounded herself and stained the rose's petals with her blood.
As a flower, however, roses also symbolize transience and impermanence. In particular, several famous verses of the Bible use flowers to symbolize the shortness of human life. Examples include Psalm 103:15-16 ("As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more") and Matthew 6:28-30 ("Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow [...] And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you.") In passages like these, flowers are beautiful when new, but they soon age and their beauty quickly fades.
In this poem, the speaker uses the rose's beauty as an image of the beloved and uses the rose's rapid decay as a contrast to his or her eternal feelings for the beloved. Although the beloved is as beautiful as a rose, the speaker will love the beloved even as she ages, and their love will ultimately last far longer than the short lifespan of a rose.
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“A Red, Red Rose” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The poem's first four lines are composed of two similes, both of which are structured in the same way. In lines 1 and 3, the speaker says his or her love is like a particular thing (first a "rose," then a "melody"); in lines 2 and 4, the speaker adds a descriptive phrase to give the reader a more detailed, vivid picture of that thing (i.e., that the rose is "newly sprung" and the melody is "sweetly played in tune").
These two similes suggest that the speaker's experience of love is too rich and complex to be communicated fully. The speaker can only say what his or her love is like. And even then, one image alone is not enough. The speaker must use multiple images to capture the multiple facets of this love.
But while the experience is complex, it is not beyond the reader's power to understand and imagine. The images used in the similes—a red rose, a sweet song—are universally associated with love. By using these common images, the speaker suggests that his or her love, while sincere and intense, is not wholly unusual. It is has something in common with all human experiences of love. With these similes, the speaker may be inviting readers to draw upon their own experiences of love in order to imagine what the speaker is feeling right now.
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Parallelism
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Imagery
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Anaphora
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Anadiplosis
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Epistrophe
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Hyperbole
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Paradox
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Consonance
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Caesura
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“A Red, Red Rose” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Luve
- Fair
- Bonnie
- A'
- Gang
- Wi'
- Sands o' life
- O'
- Fare
- Weel
Luve-
Love
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Red, Red Rose”
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Form
The poem has the form of a ballad. It has four stanzas of four lines each (quatrains), with a rhyme scheme in each stanza of ABCB.
The ballad form is an old one in English poetry, dating back centuries. It began as an oral form: ballads were not written but passed down through performance, often set to musical tunes. In the later years of his life, Robert Burns took on the project of collecting traditional Scottish ballads and songs. He would visit Scottish villages in the country and transcribe the ballads he heard sung there. Burns based "A Red, Red Rose" on a ballad he heard in the country, and he commissioned a musical accompaniment for the words. To that end, lines 3-4 are almost a reference to the form of the poem itself. Because ballads are often set to music and sung, the poem itself like the sweet melody to which the speaker compares his or her love.
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Meter
The poem has the meter associated with the ballad form: alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. This means the lines have either four (tetrameter) or three (trimeter) iambs (da DUM) per line. Take lines 5 and 6, which exhibit this perfectly:
So fair | art thou, | my bon- | nie lass,
So deep | in luv | am I;The lines are largely regular in their meter, perhaps because the poem is meant to be sung and too many metrical irregularities would make it difficult to set the poem to a consistent musical tune. Additionally, this steady meter might reflect the strength of the speaker's love.
There are, however, some irregularities. Some come from adding extra unstressed syllables at the start of the line (lines 1, 3, 10, 12, and 16); others come from altering the standard iambic feet to spondees.
The very first line does both, the double stress of "red, red" underscores just how red this rose in question really is:
O my Luve is like a red, red rose
The third stanza also has some irregularities:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;
I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.Lines 10 and 12 have an additional unstressed syllable at the start of the line. Line 11, by contrast, only has seven syllables instead of the usual eight and doesn't have the unstressed syllable at the start of the line. It could be scanned as iambic otherwise, as in the block quote above, or it could be scanned like this: "I will love thee still, my dear." In either case, the initial "I" gets an extra emphasis; if read the second way, starting with three stressed syllables in a row, the line reads much more slowly and with much greater emphasis than a standard metrical line. In this way, the altered meter would highlight the key message contained in the line—that is, that the speaker will love the beloved forever.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem has the rhyme scheme associated with the ballad form of:
ABCB
This rhyme scheme is maintained regularly through the whole poem—perhaps reflecting the steady, secure nature of the speaker's love. A possible exception could be seen in stanzas 3 and 4: because the first and third lines of those stanzas end with the same word—"dear" and "dear"; "luve" and "luve"—their rhyme scheme could be considered ABAB. This is also called identical rhyme; in any case, this just adds extra emphasis to words of affection.
The end rhymes function to link the words that share the same sound. For instance, the rhyming words "sun" and "run" in lines 10 and 12 reinforce the idea that, as the sun's heat gets intense enough to melt the rocks, it will mean the end of all life on the planet. The rhymes of "awhile" and "mile" in lines 14 and 16 remind the beloved that no matter how long the journey is (up to ten thousand miles), it will still feel short in a certain sense (just a short while) because the separation will never be permanent; the speaker will always return.
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“A Red, Red Rose” Speaker
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Most basically, the speaker of the poem is someone who is in love with the poem's addressee. The beloved is addressed as "lass," a Scottish term for a young woman, but the gender and age of the speaker are unspecified. The poem was derived from an old country ballad that was passed down through oral performance, and it's likely that the original ballad was adaptable to be sung by performers of either gender.
Overall, the speaker is not given a lot of specific identifying characteristics. This anonymity more easily allows any performer or any reader to imagine him or herself as the speaker of the poem, as do the universal symbols of love (the rose, music) in the first stanza. The Scottish dialect in the poem ("bonnie lass," "gang dry," "fare thee weel") does suggest, however, that the speaker is Scottish.
In the first stanza, the speaker describes his or her love as being like a rose that is "newly sprung." This suggests that their romantic relationship has just begun. But in the final stanza, as the speaker is preparing to leave on an extended journey, he or she tells the beloved that she is their "only luve" and promises to return to her no matter how long the journey is. This suggests that there is already a high level of commitment and trust between the couple. It may not be that the relationship is new but that the speaker still feels the same passion and excitement about the relationship even after some time has passed.
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“A Red, Red Rose” Setting
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As is the case with the poem's speaker, the setting is rather ambiguous. The Scottish dialect in the poem ("bonnie lass," "gang dry," "fare thee weel") suggests that the speaker is Scottish and that the poem may be set in Scotland, specifically in the countryside. The reference to the seas going dry is all the more powerful if the speaker and the beloved live in a country like Scotland where much of the land is close to the ocean; for people used to seeing or living close to the ocean, the image of the seas disappearing is all the more striking. The archaic diction ("art thou," "love thee") suggests that the poem may be set sometime in the past, or else in a remote area of the country where speech has not yet been modernized.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Red, Red Rose”
Literary Context
Much of Robert Burns’s fame and popularity is due to his distinctive blend of formal English and Scottish dialect, clearly seen in “A Red, Red Rose.” At the time Burns was writing, this dialect was known as “Scots.” Burns himself spent the last years of his life working to preserve and formalize the traditions of oral Scots poetry, found especially in the Scottish countryside. He collected works for several volumes of traditional Scottish songs and music, including James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.
Burns was particularly inspired by the 18th-century Scots verse of the poets Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. Burns, in turn, provided inspiration for Romantic poets like William Wordsworth ("I Wandered Lowly as a Cloud"), who wanted to leave behind the formal, artificial diction of 18th-century English poetry and adopt the language spoken by the common people. Burns, who grew up farming with his father and who was fluent in the dialect and style of rural Scotland, also inspired other working-class “peasant poets” who wrote in a more conversational style, including James Hogg, Robert Bloomfield, John Clare, and, in America, Walt Whitman ("I Hear America Singing").
“A Red, Red Rose” was first published, set to music, in Pietro Urbana’s 1794 A Selection of Scots Songs Harmonized Improved with Simple and Adapted Graces. Urbani wrote in the volume that “the words of the RED, RED ROSE were obligingly given to him by a celebrated Scots Poet, who was so struck with them when sung by a country girl that he wrote them down.”
In a letter, Burns mentions giving Urbani “a simple old Scots song which I had pickt up in this country.” The poem’s first three stanzas were reprinted in Johnson’s Museum in 1797 and in Thomson’s Scottish Airs in 1799. The poem became most popular when it was set to the tune “Low Down in the Broom” in Robert Archibald Smith’s Scottish Minstrel in 1821.
Historical Context
Burns lived during the Scottish Enlightenment, a period in the 18th and early 19th centuries of tremendous philosophical and scientific accomplishment in Scotland. Enlightenment thinkers in the capital city of Edinburgh made a point of being fluent in both Scots and standard English, and Burns was the most accomplished poet to combine both languages.
Burns also arguably draws on Enlightenment science to represent his romantic vision of enduring love. For example, the third stanza of “A Red, Red Rose” features several images that represent the passage of time: “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear/ And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.” In these lines, it is possible that Burns is purposely evoking concepts of geology and time that had recently been discovered by Enlightenment scientists.
Also during the late 18th century, the French Revolution and later wars with France meant that Britain took increased pride in its own national traditions. Sir Walter Scott’s popular historical novels about Scotland, which also used Scottish dialect, gave more prominence and importance to Scotland’s language and heritage. Collections of native folk-songs from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales celebrated the many cultures within Great Britain.
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More “A Red, Red Rose” Resources
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External Resources
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"A Red, Red Rose" Set to Music — Here you can hear Rachel Sermanni sing "A Red, Red Rose" with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in one of the poem's most popular musical settings.
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"A Red, Red Rose" Original Publication — View a digital copy of the 1794 book "A Selection of Scots Songs Harmonized Improved with Simple and Adapted Graces," in which "A Red, Red Rose" was originally published (scroll to location 80 to see the poem).
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"A Red, Red Rose" Out Loud — Listen to"A Red, Red Rose" recited by Christopher Tait, an actor who performs as Robert Burns at Burns Suppers and other Scottish events around the world.
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Robert Burns Night — This site includes information on Robert Burns Night, a celebration of Scotland's national poet that is held every year in places all over the world.
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The Robert Burns Encyclopedia — This resource includes information on Robert Burns's life, writings, and nearly every person and place connected with Burns.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Burns
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