Roses and Pearls
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Your spoken words are roses fine and sweet,
The songs you sing are perfect pearls of sound.
How lavish nature is about your feet,
To scatter flowers and jewels both around.
Blushing the stream of petal beauty flows,
Softly the white strings trickle down and shine.
Oh! speak to me, my love, I crave a rose.
Sing me a song, for I would pearls were mine.
This love poem is a twining of two subjects: her spoken words and the songs she sings. Each is twined with their respective metaphors: roses and pearls. The first line approaches her voice as roses in the same way that roses are the first word of the title.
Here the word fine may take on a more descriptive notion than just merely satisfaction, as in "that's fine" here the petals may be delicate and fragrant in subtle ways. As in the french word fine which means delicate.
The second line brings in alliteration with perfect pearls and songs you sing. The poem has a rhyme scheme of ABAB and is elegant and concise in it's topic.
The third line is a build up to the fourth in which Dunbar addresses both metaphors by another name, lauding her richness. In the fourth line roses become flowers and pearls become jewels.
Here the subtlety of Dunbar evinces itself again as the blush of the roses is conveyed through blushing and its obvious connotations to her cheek. The beauty of petals is indeed flowing across all her person in this poem.
The sixth line conveys how the songs she sings trickle down and shine. Here the notes of her voice could be construed as individual pearls, the way one might read them in sheet music. There's a little bit of synesthesia in depicting visually the qualities of her sounds. The complimentary nature of Dunbar's love poetry is that his excellence in imagery is conveyed towards the sound of his lover's voice in both song and speech. Dunbar does this paradoxically in written form. The power of this is that in the reading of the poetry it is itself a conveyance of sound, but here it paints visual impressions of the beauty of his lovers voice.
The sixth and seventh line conveys the narrators difficulty in restraining his passion and craving for her words and song. Imbued as they are with such imagery, Dunbar reinforces the connection between words and roses and pearls and song in the last lines.
Here the word fine may take on a more descriptive notion than just merely satisfaction, as in "that's fine" here the petals may be delicate and fragrant in subtle ways. As in the french word fine which means delicate.
The second line brings in alliteration with perfect pearls and songs you sing. The poem has a rhyme scheme of ABAB and is elegant and concise in it's topic.
The third line is a build up to the fourth in which Dunbar addresses both metaphors by another name, lauding her richness. In the fourth line roses become flowers and pearls become jewels.
Here the subtlety of Dunbar evinces itself again as the blush of the roses is conveyed through blushing and its obvious connotations to her cheek. The beauty of petals is indeed flowing across all her person in this poem.
The sixth line conveys how the songs she sings trickle down and shine. Here the notes of her voice could be construed as individual pearls, the way one might read them in sheet music. There's a little bit of synesthesia in depicting visually the qualities of her sounds. The complimentary nature of Dunbar's love poetry is that his excellence in imagery is conveyed towards the sound of his lover's voice in both song and speech. Dunbar does this paradoxically in written form. The power of this is that in the reading of the poetry it is itself a conveyance of sound, but here it paints visual impressions of the beauty of his lovers voice.
The sixth and seventh line conveys the narrators difficulty in restraining his passion and craving for her words and song. Imbued as they are with such imagery, Dunbar reinforces the connection between words and roses and pearls and song in the last lines.
No comments:
Post a Comment