Poem response: One Perfect Rose - Research Paper Example

It can also be seen to portray the changing modes of self-expression in poets who wrote during the twentieth century. The poem talks of the kind of love that is usually expressed in classical poetry. The symbol of love is a rose that can communicate feelings of love and faithfulness. In such forms of poetry that existed in earlier centuries, the ideas of love were simpler and were based on a patriarchal hierarchy where men would occupy the dominant position. The position of the subject would always be the man.

He would be the lover who would then have the prerogative to send a token of his love to the beloved who would be the woman. The beloved would occupy the position of the object as she would not be in a position to take any action on her own. This would be an intensely sexist position to take as far as one’s ideological leaning is concerned. However, the society of those times sanctified such gender relations. What Parker’s poem does is to make the anachronistic nature of such poetry very clear to her readership which was a part of the twentieth century.

The rose that was till then a symbol of love is built up as exactly that during the first two stanzas where the rose becomes the symbol of the love between the lover and the beloved. This stanza talks of a relationship of love that operates in a timeless and non-economic manner. It is therefore, in a certain sense, other-worldly. This is to say that the love that is talked about is divorced from its materiality. The symbolism of the rose deliberately takes love away from the world and establishes it as something that exists in the realm of the pure.

The problem with this approach is that it fails to take a view of what really exists between lovers. The real relations of production in the society are left unchanged. The second part of the poem where Parker talks of the narrator’s desire that her lover would gift her a limousine is very different from the first. In the first part of the poem, Parker uses language that reminds one of the love poetry that was written in medieval England. However, in the second part of the poem, the language and the images that are employed are modern and contemporary.

The content is referred to in a matter of fact manner and the love between the two lovers is not sought to be turned into something that is other-worldly and divorced from the everyday realities of the world. The economic aspects of life are extremely important in the love that is a part of the third stanza of this poem. Apart from this, the stanza also points to the material aspect of the twentieth century. This is not to say that materialism was not a part of the kind of love that existed in earlier times; it had however, been acknowledged more readily in the twentieth century.

The limousine becomes a symbol of this materialism that animated the twentieth century and was a part of every aspect of it. What Parker does through this act of hers is to undercut works of literature and other arts that propagate such images and understandings of love. To make clear the social and even ethical aspects of love is what Parker does, through this short poem. Parker’s poem talks about love in a way that was different from those of the classical poets. In this sense, she records not just the changing social norms regarding love around her but also the changing ways in