Tennyson remarked of his dead friend that ![]() That the shy unpolluted blue invites its opposite. Consider the sexual excitement engendered by Shakespeare's metaphor for Lucrece's breasts before the rape: "two ivory globes circled with blue." This leads us in turn to the reflection that If the red rose represented the shed blood of the penetrated female, as well as the suffusion of excited blood, the "blue" of the violet represents the excitement of blood still in the veins, not yet shed, but sheddable. Tennyson himself quoted Hamlet's elegy for Ophelia in the context of his deathly blooms: The literary violet is associated with virginal and dead flesh. Wordsworth's solitary (and dead) Lucy is seen as "a violet by a mossy stone," and Tennyson sees his elegies for his dead friend Arthur Henry Hallam as violets that "bud and blossom" on his grave. The violet, as against the rose, is a shrinking flower, hiding itself in shadows. It is perhaps significant that the British Labor Party has replaced the fierce expanse of its Red Flag with a trailing, half-closed, wispy, wimpy Red Rose, feminine and nonaggressive, and indeed not solidly red but only vaguely and streakily so. The red rose, in this context, can be attacking or attacked. ![]() Herbert's exquisite uncolored adjectives for his clearly red rose - his "hue angrie and brave" - denote riddlingly a woman defending her virtue, or a flag of attack. The color red is also associated with aggression and threat. The rose can be seen as the analogue of the female sex organs, penetrated by busy bees or invisible worms, and bleeding. Rose red is the color of blushing and thus of flesh engorged by blood and excited by sexual passion (as Christopher Ricks has pointed out in his work on blushing in "Keats and Embarrassment"). Or we might take a look at Herbert's poem "Vertue," where he apostrophizes the rose: "My luve is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June,"where the poet feels the need to stress the redness, even redundantly. ![]() The effect of the starkness of the statement "Roses are red" is to move the reader's mind toward a kind of absolute, uncompromising state of mind, signified by the primary color. In both cases there has been a subtraction of white, which, as we shall see, has considerable significance. Pink is not red, nor is violet-mauve blue. ![]() What an alert deconstructionist must immediately observe is that the two flower words are, in many other languages besides English, also color nouns or adjectives, though in neither case does the meaning of the flower color coincide with the attributed color in the poem. This statement, like the following statement about violets, consists of a noun, a flower name, followed by one of those ambivalent color adjectives that have half the status of nouns and occasion endless discussion among philosophers as to the nature of the quality of "redness" and whether or not it "inheres" in the object. My reading of the Valentine quatrain cannot therefore offer itself as definitive, but it can, I think, illuminate this deceptively simple text, tease out, or, as we say, "unpack" some surprising implications. All texts read all other texts, and, according to modern theories of intertextuality, modern texts may read older ones. We know now, thanks to Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists, that words have no necessary or stable meaning but take their place in the shifting and endless tissue or text of language, of which we are all a part. Recent critical developments have made it possible to extend this insight to a mass of other apparently "innocent" work. That wise critic Frank Kermode observed justly that it was not until the second half of the 20th century that Keats was seen to be a "difficult" poet. Roses are red,Violets are blue,Sugar is sweetAnd so are you.
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