Analyzing Marianne Moore's 'Roses Only'

Rachel Hamilton
Ms. Lynn
5th Block
18 December 2012
Poetry Analysis Essay Marianne Moore was born in St. Louis, Missouri on November 15, 1887 and passed in New York City in 1972. Her grandfather raised her, and after his death, she and her family members stayed with many other relatives. She began teaching in New York at Carlisle Indian School in 1915. In 1921, she became an assistant at the New York Public Library where she began to meet many other famous poets. Moore’s poem started becoming published in 1915, in the Egoist, an English magazine. She was highly recognized for all of her work and received many honors, such as the Bollingen prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In her free verse poem “Roses Only,” she
Words like “beauty,” “spirit,” “superiority,” and “self-dependent”, in the first eight lines, all show a tone of confidence. The words “ambitious” and “pre-eminence” set the flattering or reassuring tone. There is three changes in tone in the poem, from showing confidence, to a flattery type tone, and then to a reassuring tone. The first change in tone, from the confidential tone, is represented after, “…self-dependent, anything an ambitious civilization might produce…”. The shift from flattery to reassuring comes after, “You cannot make us think you a delightful happen-so.”, from there it continues the reassuring
The metaphor, “…beauty is a liability rather than an asset…” basically says that being beautiful on the outside can only weigh one down if that is the only trait that is present. “…conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority…to confuse presumptions resulting from observation, is idle,” these few lines say that, one does not need to have an attractive face to be noticed. As Marianne begins to compare true beauty to a rose, she starts to talk about what anyone would be without the imperfections. “But rose, if, you are brilliant, it is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence,” says that no one is brilliant because of outside appearances. “Would you not, minus thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere perculiarity,” means without imperfections, perfection is more of an outcast. A rose without thorns is just a flower, and a human without imperfections is hardly human. Imperfections make people up, “what is brilliance without co-ordination,” says “what are petals without thorns,” which means, what are you without imperfections and only beauty? Imperfections are better to be left alone than altered, people will remember the little things that are not noticeable not how beautiful you are. “Guarding the infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently, your thorns are the best part of you,” means the same