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The Nightingale and the Rose

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The Nightingale and the Rose
"The Nightingale and the Rose" by Oscar Wilde was published in 1990. It’s a story of the consequences of not appreciating creation. It’s about a student who was told by a girl that she would dance if he brought her a red rose. Unfortunately the boy has no red roses and crying about his despair when a nightingale heard him. The nightingale got touched by the students story and decided to help him. He flew away looking for a red rose. He was searching but didn’t find any until he found one rose bush that told him to pierce his heart on a thorn to bleed on a white rose so it would become. He did it and died. The boy finds the rose and is very happy. He brings it to the girl but she rejects the rose because it won’t match her dress and because she found someone that bought her jewellery so the boy throws the rose away and says that love is ridiculous and that logic is better. The main themes are love, death wealth. How are these themes shown in this story?

The symbol of love in this story is the red rose. A lot of other words are mentioned in this story to represent love such as: lover, heart and passion.
This text shows us that love is fickle, because the student quickly changed his mind about it after he realised he could not provide the girl with what she wanted. It becomes insignificant and useless just like the rose that the student threw away. After he got hurt, he states that logic is more important than love: ‘What a silly thing love is… it is not half as useful as logic.’ He switches to one thing to another very quickly.

Death appears when the rose tree tells the nightingale that in order to get a red rose, he needs to sacrifice himself. There are only a few words that describe the lexical field of death. These words are: blood, tomb and dead.
Suffering: sorrow, lonely, tears, pain

Wealth: prince, pearls, gold, jewels
The girl was materialistic and her love is measured in terms of wealth: ‘The chamberlain’s nephew has sent me some real jewels, and

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