White Roses

"Woman with a Rose"
Kenneth Frazier



It has been my custom these past few years to listen to the "Sunday Baroque" program on the classical radio station while driving to Mass. One Sunday, they played music from John Blow's Venus and Adonis,  and the announcer, in her introduction, related a version of the myth I had never heard of before. I grew up with the version, first encountered in Edith Hamilton's Mythology, that "a crimson flower" sprang up where Adonis' blood fell. Other versions tell of a flower the hue of a pomegranate; still others plainly state that it was an anemone. The announcer on "Sunday Baroque," however, said that when Venus wept at Adonis' death, white roses sprang up where her tears fell. Almost immediately, a line in iambic pentameter came into my mind: "White roses bloom where I have shed my tears." I thought it a very good opener for a sonnet, and couldn't wait to get home and work on it. The notion that the goddess of love's deepest and purest love was for a man who never loved her in return moved me, as it hit very close to home—which is why I felt compelled to write the poem.

 

First, though, I did a bit of research on the net and found mention of the white rose twist of the myth, but couldn't find an actual text of the myth itself that included it. However, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist. I decided to keep the white roses, but the original line wound up being the closing line rather than the opener. In writing the first draft, I found myself associating the basic premise of the story with the concept of courtly love, or chaste love, symbolized by alabaster as well as the white rose, which in turn brought in the reference to carnal love, symbolized by the red, or "ruddy" rose.

The rhyme scheme of this sonnet is a bit unusual: abcdabcd eeffgg

 



White Roses 

 

He lay in alabaster night; no kiss

of ruddy rose had ever touched his limbs.

No hand of mine, however loving, dared

to break the night's pure silence, choosing life

eternal over momentary bliss.

Had bold, irreverent songs drowned out the hymns

that brought his sleep, had baser instinct bared

what better instinct hid, then day's bright knife

 

would have cut short that alabaster night

and taken him forever from this sight;

then in the place of his ennobled brow,

there would not be the witness living now:

that after all the staid, untarnished years,

white roses bloom where I have shed my tears.

 

 

© Leticia Austria 2010