Would a Rose by another Name really smell as Sweet?

More than any other flower the rose inspires poets, philosophers and composers with thoughts of beauty and sorrow.

Commenting on recent local elections here a journalist said ‘. . . but it’s not all a rose garden’ for the dominant party. The party leader might well have responded with lines from the 1967 Joe South song:

I beg your pardon

I never promised you a rose garden

Along with the sunshine

There’s got to be a little rain sometime . . .

The image of the rose is so rich with colour, texture and fragrance that it has become shorthand for a state of bliss. Yet, apart from local politics, which is anything but a rose garden, it has for centuries been a sexual/romantic, religious and political symbol.

The ancient Greek poet, Sappho (610-570 BCE), called it the ‘queen’ of flowers. In the thirteenth century erotic allegory The Romance of the Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris, the poet tells of a dream in which desire takes him unawares and he falls for a rosebud. He must, however, wait until the young girl is mature before approaching her. |First, he is educated in the art of love and then has to navigate the flower’s thorny resistance. After their tryst her beauty fades.

 When that madness had taken me,

In a snare from which few go free,

And those rosebushes did appear,

Then, you must know, as I drew near,

That their perfume, the sweet excess,

Entering me, did my core possess.

No less than if I’d been embalmed.

(Part II, ch. xii, Trans. A.S. Kline)

Sex and death are intertwined here. This is the paradox of the rose whose scent and intricate flower is seductive but whose thorns make it tricky to hold.

  Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, is set a century after the writing of Lorris’ poem. It’s a mystery story, filled with playful nods to other writers but one of the mysteries surrounding the book is precisely what the title refers to. At the end of the novel Eco, who was a professor of semiotics, says that all we have now of the rose is a ‘naked’ name. In his view we have so burdened the flower with symbolic readings that it has been drained of its former beauty.

Gertrude Stein plays with the word (and many others!)  in her poem, ‘Sacred Emily’ (1913), ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’. Does the repetition drain the word of meaning or open new meanings? We expect a definition but it defines itself. It can mean only itself, no other meaning arises. In essence, the line imitates the structure of the flower, petals enfolded in petals, to the point of consuming itself.

 Where roses are politics is never far behind. In 1981, then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, travestied Stein’s line by saying ‘A crime is a crime is a crime’, referring to the actions of the IRA. The Wars of the Roses (1455-85) disputing a claim to the crown of England were named for the supposed badges of the warring factions, the red rose of the House of Lancaster and the white rose of the House of York.

  James Joyce juggles these English roses in his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Father Arnall has divided his class into teams named York and Lancaster, and the lads wear corresponding coloured ribbons on their lapels. When Stephen Dedalus fails to solve an arithmetic problem for his team, Lancaster, his mind drifts to the coloured roses:

Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face quite cool. He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.   

His reference to the song echoes the opening page of the novel where the child, mixing up its lines, produces: ‘O, the green wothe botheth.’ The green rose is a nod to Oscar Wilde’s green carnation and to Irish nationalism, thus a doubly ironic comment on Fr. Arnall’s appropriation of the English royal houses for the classroom competition. In his allegorical poem, ‘My Dark Rosaleen’, James Clarence Mangan (1803-49), a poet admired by Joyce, addresses his lover, Ireland, enslaved by colonial rule, as ‘my saint of saints . . . my flower of flowers’. Thus, he fuses the romantic, political and religious symbolism of the rose.

Mystical and spiritual associations with the rose are as many and various as erotic and political ones. It occurs frequently in Christianity as an emblem of Christ, and his mother Mary, to whom the prayer cycle, the rosary, is dedicated. When Dante’s Pilgrim in The Divine Comedy (1308-21) nears the end of his journey in Paradise he is shown a white rose, the Celestial Rose, where the Heavenly host sits to receive God’s love, delivered by the angels:

like bees that in a single motion swarm

and dip into the flowers, then return

to heaven’s hive where their toil turns to joy—


descended all at once on that great bloom

of precious petals, and then flew back up

to where its source of love forever dwells. 

(Canto XXXI, ll.7-12)

Rose light in the Theatre de Champs Elysees.

Perhaps because of its many-layered nest of petals the rose also became a symbol of secrecy, giving us the legal term sub rosa and secret orders such as Rosicrucianism. This esoteric doctrine, combining elements of Christian and Jewish mysticism, was established in sixteenth century Germany and takes as its symbol a rose, for love, at the centre of the cross, for suffering. Revived in the late nineteenth century, its beliefs inspired W.B. Yeats, who joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and turned its core symbol to political account in his collection The Rose (1893):  

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!

You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled

Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring

The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.

Beauty grown sad with its eternity

Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea.  

In Tennessee Williams’ play, The Rose Tattoo, (1950) the widowed Serafina Delle Rose, refusing to believe the stories of her late husband’s philandering, says ‘Nobody knew my rose of the world but me and now they can lie because the rose ain’t living.’ But her rose was not as pure as she imagines. Likewise, not every rose is beautiful or sweet. Some, like William Blake’s (1757-1827) are sick. Blake, whose work was championed by Yeats, was subject to visions and opposed to institutional religion. This poem was included in his Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789).

Poem as etched by Blake and coloured by his wife, Catherine (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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To answer my opening question, pace Shakespeare, I don’t believe a rose would smell as sweet if it were called otherwise. We have perfumed the rose with so many rich associations that we cannot look at it naked, pace also Eco. We must perforce see all its history as a symbol of beauty, love and political uprising which enrich its perfume.

In ‘An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’ (1751) Thomas Gray wrote ‘Full many a flower was born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air’ which carries an echo of Edmund Waller’s (1606-87) poem ‘Go, lovely Rose’:

Go, lovely Rose—

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.


Tell her that’s young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died.

Unnamed, the rose would languish unknown. Today, we have over 20,000 varieties of the flower, each with its own name, frequently that of a beautiful women (my father loved his Ingrid Bergman rose). Here, the process of naming is reversed, the rose remains a rose but summons the image of another near equal in beauty. I’m not convinced that when Romeo makes his famous declaration he fully means it. Implicitly, he is comparing Juliet to a rose, but perhaps part of her attraction is the taboo created by their feuding families. Love and local politics are a potent mix.

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What do you think? Would the rose smell as sweet if it had another name? Do you have a favourite rose poem or story, if so do share it here.