A Red, Red Rose was written by Robert Burns a Folk Hero, Poet who is regarded as one of the very famous characters in Cultural history in Scotland. He also has three nicknames which are Ploughman Poet, Scotland’s favorite son and Rabbie Burns. He was born January 25, 1759 in Alloway, Ayrshire, in southwestern Scotland and died at the age of 37, in July 21, 1796 at Dumfries, Scotland. For his lyrical poetry and his re-writing of Scottish folk songs, he has been best known as a pioneer of the Romantic Movement which many are still well-known today around the world. Though most of his best poems and songs were written in Scots, he also wrote them in English for the English spoken public. The poem is about a man declaring his deepest …show more content…
Written in ballad stanzas, the verse - read today as a poem – pieces together conventional ideas and images of love in a way that transcends the "low" or non-literary sources from which the poem is drawn. In it, the speaker compares his love first with a blooming rose in spring and then with a melody "sweetly played in tune." If these similes seem the typical fodder for love-song lyricists, the second and third stanzas introduce the subtler and more complex implications of time. In trying to quantify his feelings - and in searching for the perfect metaphor to describe the "eternal" nature of his love - the speaker inevitably comes up against love's greatest limitation, "the sands o' life." This image of the hour-glass forces the reader to reassess of the poem's first and loveliest image: A red, red rose is itself an object of an hour, "newly sprung" only "in June" and afterward subject to the decay of time. This treatment of time and beauty predicts the work of the later Romantic poets, who took Burns work as an important …show more content…
This means that the first and third lines of each stanza have four stressed syllables, or beats, while the second and fourth lines have three stressed syllables. Quatrains written in this manner are called ballad stanzas. The ballad is an old form of verse adapted for singing or recitation, originating in the days when most poetry existed in spoken rather than written form. The typical subject matter of most ballads reflects folk themes are important to common people: love, courage, the mysterious, and the supernatural. Though the ballad is generally rich in musical qualities such as rhythm and repetition, it often portrays both ideas and feelings in overwrought but simplistic terms. The dominant meter of the ballad stanza is iambic, which means the poem's lines are constructed in two-syllable segments, called iambs, in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed. As an example of iambic meter, consider the following line from the poem with the stresses