After the 1786 publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect,
Robert Burns spent the last ten years of his life collecting and editing
songs for The Scots Musical Museum, an anthology intended to preserve
traditional Scottish lyrical forms. During this time, Burns also
composed more than three hundred original works for the volume, songs
that relied heavily on forms and sentiments popular in the folk culture
of the Scottish peasantry. 'A Red, Red Rose', first published in 1794 in
A Selection of Scots Songs, edited by Peter Urbani, is one such song.
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 play'd 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's work as an important influence.