Analysis of the Poem A Red Red Rose by Robert Burns
Robert Burns is one of the most celebrated poets of all time. He has several poems to his name in which he employs a number of poetic devices and aesthetics of poetry. In the poem A Red Red Rose he immensely uses rich literary skill and knowledge to bring out aesthetics beauty in poetry. The poem uses a couple of literary devices and form in bringing out its beauty and true meaning.
The overall structure of the poem takes the traditional ballad that contains four stanzas that contain four lines each. All the lines in the poems can be broken down to iambic beats that follows a distinct patter. For instance, in every stanza, the first and third lines have four iambs, the second and fourth lines have three iambs too. In the poem, the use of short lines gives the poem the qualities of a song now that it is a ballad. The rhyme scheme cannot be ignored too, it follows the ‘abcb’ and this makes it sound more of a song than a poem.
There are two main literary devices that Burn employs and they are similes and metaphors. In the first stanza, Burn compares the love for a woman to a red rose and to a song that is played in the summer. The narrator says “O my Luve is like a red, red rose..O my Luve is like the melody”. The second stanza equally compares the narrator’s love to the woman’s beauty but it moves on to a metaphor especially when he says that he intends to luve her “until all the seas go dry”. These are some of the examples that show how Burn has incorporated style in the poem.
