And What Were Roses - Analysis

Roses as an idea that outgrows its own name

This poem keeps trying to answer a deceptively simple question—what are roses?—and ends by making the rose less a flower than a presence the mind can’t hold still. The speaker begins by doubting his own definitions: roses might be Perfume, but he forget; they might be mere Music that rises unsurely in twilight. Even these classic “rose” associations feel thin, like secondhand knowledge. What the poem insists on is that roses are something experienced rather than cataloged: something more, paradoxically more maturely / childish, and even more beautiful almost than you. That last comparison jolts—who is you, and why is the rose threatening to surpass a beloved person?

The turn: from flower to visitor

The poem’s clearest hinge comes with Yet if not flower,tell me softly who. The question changes key: we leave botany and enter haunting. Roses become haunters of dreams, figures with cool faces, moving with muted steps. They are always demurely / halfsmiling, a controlled, almost courtly kind of mystery. The diction makes them feel both intimate and untouchable—close enough to see the half-smile, too cool to be fully known. In other words, the rose becomes a dream-visitor: not a thing in the hand, but a presence that arrives, withdraws, and returns on its own terms.

Ladies, queens: the rose turns into a social world

Once the rose becomes a “who,” it quickly becomes a “they.” The speaker tries on identities for these dream-haunters: ladies,ladies of my dreams who justly touching roses make their fingers whitely / live by. The odd phrase live by suggests the rose is not an accessory but a kind of sustenance, even a moral right—touching roses is something these figures do justly, as if they belong together by law of imagination. Then the poem escalates: or better, / queens, not merely refined but sovereign, laughing lightly, crowned with far colors. The rose has become a miniature court: elegance, power, distance, and a soft, drifting laughter that feels like sound in a dream rather than in a room.

Childish maturity, proud demureness: the poem’s central contradiction

The speaker keeps praising contradictions because that’s what the rose-world is made of. The “more” he senses is more maturely / childish: innocence that isn’t naïve, play that has depth. The dream figures are demurely half-smiling yet somewhat proudly too, combining modesty with self-possession. Even the queens’ minds hold a startling purity: thinking very much / of nothing. That nothing isn’t emptiness so much as freedom from the speaker’s craving to pin meanings down. In this light, the earlier line more beautiful almost than you starts to read less like cruelty and more like confession: the rose, as dream-logic, can be “more beautiful” than any real person because it doesn’t have to be consistent, practical, or fully knowable.

Dawn’s touch, willows, streams: beauty that refuses possession

The ending places these rose-figures in a landscape of gentle motion: whom dawn loves most to touch, wishing by willows, bending upon streams. Dawn touches them—not the speaker. They bend, they wish, they hover beside water; everything suggests nearness without ownership. The poem’s softest triumph is that it keeps asking for an answer (tell me softly who) while also arranging conditions where no final answer can survive: twilight, muted steps, far colors, stream-bending. A rose, here, is the name we give to a kind of beauty that arrives like a visitor, behaves like a queen, and leaves us with desire that feels both childish and strangely grown.

If the rose outshines you, what is the speaker really choosing?

The poem never tells us whether the speaker is betraying a person for an ideal, or admitting that his imagination will always compete with his relationships. But by turning roses into ladies and queens who are loved by dawn, it quietly suggests a harsh possibility: that the speaker is most faithful not to anyone present, but to what can’t answer back—figures who remain halfsmiling precisely because they remain out of reach.