When comes up the conventions associated with a rose they think of love. This is the symbol a increased endeavours. However this interpretation is not static and for most a increased symbolises many different things. In literary convention terms a rose is associated with sensitive love, appreciation, love, beauty and roses portray the positive thoughts inside one. There are many different rose colorings each portraying a certain so this means and in each case a positive interpretation. While bearing these conventions associated with a rose at heart I am going to analyse H. D. 's 'Sea Rose'.
H. D was a literary girl of the twentieth century who became profoundly considering the imagist motion. H. D is a modernist poet and one can see from reading her poetry that there is strong feminist rules expressed throughout. Her poems came too early for an audience who weren't ready to respond to these feminist principles (Pound, 1997-2010). One can characterise H. Ds poetry by the "power of her images, overall economy of terminology and use of classical technique" (Pound, 1997-2010, http://www. poets. org/poet. php/prmPID/234). The poetic form of imagism is obviously seen in H. D's poems. Imagism was an enormous part of modernist writing, it is "a literary motion launched by British and North american poets early on in the 20th Century that advocated the use of free verse, common talk patterns, and clear concrete images as a a reaction to Victorian sentimentalism" (LoveToKnow Corp, 1996). H. D. s poem the 'Sea Rose' is seen as an imagist poem because of its appearance of visuals images throughout the poem. These visible images can be seen through the quality of appearance throughout the poem. Imagism poetry aimed to "replace muddy abstractions with exactness of experienced aspect, apt metaphors, and market of terms" (Pound, 1997-2010, http://www. poets. org/viewmedia. php/prmMID/5658). This new motion of imagist poetry has had a huge effect on many poets throughout the 20th Century.
H. Ds 'Sea Rose' poem is about much more when compared to a rose. It shows to the audience that you need to look through the image to see the eternal condition and this is what imagist poets write about. The literary conventions that you associates the rose such as smooth and the typical red rose of romanticism is not similar here, it isn't a smooth rose but instead "harsh"(. . . 1), it's not sweet like you might expect a rose to be but instead its "acrid" (. . . 15). Through the entire poem we are not told of the colour of the rose or indeed of any colour. You can say through this poem H. D is saying there is no exact meaning of the rose and that these symbols any particular one affiliate with a rose are not exact, however instead the rose itself defies its symbolic representation.
One can see the poetic form of imagism throughout the poem through H. D's recognized fine detail of the rose. This rose is a specific exposition of a single flower from the garden. As mentioned by Nelson
"the brief, carefully measured free verse lines, alongside the marginally archaic (though still direct) diction and the insistence on the sparseness of the blossom tend to supply the poem a convenience and solidity, a sense of the visual or sculptural realness of the sea rose-"Sea Rose" could almost be a poem of image and bit more".
(Nelson, 2000)
Gender is also prevalent throughout 'Sea Rose'. One could say that the first few lines of the poem symbolises the non-conforming girl of the twentieth century- the rose is "harsh" (. . . 1) and living on the restrictions of different worlds. There is a gender issue present, if one was to perceive this rose as the twentieth female who was mainly a housewife and mom and only area of the private sphere but who is fighting to enter into the public. When bearing this at heart, one can see the rose as been a metaphor for the movements of women in to the open public sphere and then one can see that the rose is portraying the hard time that women of this period have to go through to get this independence, like the rose who's having a difficult time caught between the sand and drinking water. Similar to the rose is "caught in a drift" (. . . 8) between your sand and normal water so too are these women trapped "in the drift" (. . . 8) of the masculine society. The surroundings which this rose is placed is not stable as the tide it is continually moving. The rose is been transferred around by the sand which is been shifted about by the ocean. This can be viewed as H. D portraying society, many people are been "flung" (. . . 10) about by these more dominating forces which one can interpret as male forces. To me these dominant forces can be regarded as the patriarchal male population of the time. That is an imagist poem where nature is predominant, the climate in which surrounds the rose is not welcoming "crisp sand that drives in the breeze" (. . . 12-13) just as society of that time period is not welcoming of women getting into the public sphere. The rose is at isolation "single on the stem" (7), alone in the wilderness. The increased is seen as an allegory of a female who too is similar to this rose who's exclusively in the wilderness and trapped between two worlds.
Through this analyse I hope I've conveyed that there is a deeper hidden meaning to be observed in H. D's poem 'Sea Rose' and given thought you a thought of what H. D may be wanting to portray through this poem. While there are many different perceptions to be obtained from 'Sea Rose' it is clear that H. D is discussing much more when compared to a simply a rose and instead the deeper interpretation is seen when one studies the thing in isolation.
