“Love is a rose, but you better not pick it, only grows when it’s on the vine,” Neil Young once sang.
This is the song that ran through my head when I read her latest posted poem, a poem that seems on the surface to be a social commentary about class and status, but in reality, appears to be much more.
You don’t use the rose image without dredging up an entire history of romance.
The poem takes place in a mythical wealthy suburban landscape where there are no sidewalks, and so no riffraff, or for that matter any pedestrians who might pause and sniff at the fragrant roses planted there.
Stopping to smell the roses is a metaphor for appreciation of life, the goodness we have, and taking time to notice the small but significant things that make like pleasant. The irony of the town’s name and the fact that nobody can actually appreciate life is no accident in this poem.
But it is important to notice how the poem uses the roses, and later “the rose,” and creates a dynamic to suggest that the poem is also about love or lack of appreciation for love – and may well be directed at her former lover, who has chosen a life with his wife in the suburbs and wealth over someone like the poem, who is more down to earth.
This may be a wrong interpretation but based on the series of poems she’s posted for the last few months; it seems likely that this is a message.
As a social commentary, the poem mocks the wealthy people who pay their gardeners, who do the work of planting and are much more in touch with the soil “the raw sweet earth” a kind of Gaia image – possibly an unconscious sexual image as well, of people who embrace the soil while the rich people contemplate how to increase their wealth – hardly aware of the roses or the soil at all, “depriving themselves of the pleasure of the earth and of the Rose to maintain.”
Taken as a personal commentary, she may well be telling her former lover that he’s missing out on real love, and unable to maintain it.
The roses early in the poem conjure up images of wealth and prestige, while The Rose, love, sex, tenderness, and suggests it has been neglected.
Whether the use of the gardener may or may not imply some intermediary her lover has used to pacify her or keep her from coming to close, it is difficult to say. But there is the implication that the man she was involved with has gone back to his perfect world, his perfect wife and his obsession with making money, leaving her behind, without even sidewalks, and she implies she may well with the riffraff this intended to keep away.
The poem suggests that maintaining love “The roses” takes hard work and caring hands and is critical of the class structure in which the wealthy maintain their status on the backs of other, perhaps kinder and more in touch people.
In fact, the whole world is designed to keep some “riffraff” out. Without sidewalks, people need to get there by cars or buses, poor people are too busy to stop and smell the roses, and so are the wealthy but for different reasons, too consumed with maintaining their wealth or obtaining more. And if the sense of love, too busy living that uppity life style to care about anyone like the poet.
Because this poem stands out in a sequence of poems that clearly involved the same married man, I believe this is more of the same, if not quite a parting shot at someone who has chosen his upscale life over loving her, then a comment on that choice, and with just a hint of bitterness.
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