Each rose that comes brings me greetings from the rose of an eternal spring.
--Rabindranth Tagore, Bengali poet
Roses in the Shire seem to have come and gone with early spring.
I always thought of them as coming in June,
perhaps because of these lines in the poem
"A Red, Red Rose" by Robert Burns:
Oh, my luve's like a red, red, rose
that's newly sprung in June
Here are some fuschia-red, red roses, sprung in early May:
There is something irresistable about roses.
Maybe it's the arrangement of the petals or the heavy perfume
that makes one want to possess them.
In Robert Frost's poem, "Asking for Roses"
the narrator is walking by an abandoned house surrounded by old-fashioned roses.
He wants badly to pick some and bring them home,
but there is no one to ask for permission. He laments:
A flower unplucked is but left to the falling,
and nothing is gained by not gathering roses.
Here are a few roses I came upon but did not gather:
I also came upon these twin orange roses,
overlooked and unnoticed,
nearly covered by juniper in the median of a parking lot.
They are evocative of two lines
from a Carl Sandburg poem called "Smoke Rose Gold":
Out of haze over the sunset
out of a smoke rose gold ...
Roses capture the imagination of anyone and everyone.
According to Illinois University Extension,
there is evidence that roses have been with us for more than 35 million years.
That's a lot of poetry.
Why does the world love roses so much?
Ralph Waldo Emerson probably explained it the best when he said:
There is simply the rose.
It is perfect in every moment of its existence.
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