scarlet blossoms with velvet thorns

I love this poem. the only potential issue I can see is the use of a lot of redundant words.


now the fun part: analyzing

so one thing I want to bring up is flower language

red means romance
pink means appreciation and gratitude
yellow means friendship

the blood matching the colour of the red rose could be a metaphor for love requiring sacrifice? The line "the gleefull innocents of our yellow rose fades away" may be a metaphor for a friendship evolving into romance.

Hi honeymoon! Happy Cake Day, what a great way to celebrate it by going back to an old piece and giving it a make-over!

I'll be using the Knights of the Green Room Challenge questions to format my review.

1. What are your first thoughts after reading this poem?
After I'm done reading, I'm left a little in the dark about exactly what the meaning of the poem is. There's some gorgeous imagery along the way though so even if I can't completely get the meaning out of this rose metaphor, I can still appreciate the poem for its imagery and word choice. I liked the thought about trying to ignore the rose stem pricking our fingers, and I also really liked the contrast with the innocent yellow rose.

2. What did you like and dislike? Why?
Likes
As I said above, imagery is definitely the strong-suit of this piece. Ever line paints an image for the reader as the speaker holds our attention following these flowers. It reminds me almost of the forbidden fruit in the garden of eden, where the speaker wants what they shouldn't have.

Dislikes
There wasn't anything I disliked exactly in this poem, but I think some parts could be improved upon a bit. For instance, one thing I thought when reading this was that some of the lines got really wordy despite not saying a ton. I think that in a few places you can let the reader fill in the gaps and make the lines a little less word-heavy. Like in the first line, there's no need to say "famous" because you make that claim implicitly in the following line with the phrase "known for"... I would go through again and see if some other little words here and there are really necessary.

Another aspect that could be improved upon, is making the meaning just a little more obvious. I left the poem feeling like I had read something lovely, but not really knowing what it meant.

3. What did you think the meaning of the poem was?
The big clue for me on what this poem means is the last line, "sometimes a little bit of pain can bring the most beauty" -- so sometimes we have to suffer in order to get our reward, or in order to experience beauty. That seems pretty clear, but then mapping that on to the flower metaphor throughout is a little bit more difficult. Maybe the different flowers are describing different pains? The yellow, a loss of innocence, the pink a loss or gain of grace? I'm not sure what the irises symbolize, and I'm wondering if this poem is truly about beauty or if beauty is also a symbol for something.

4. Was there anything that seemed "off" to you? Why did it seem "off"?
While I like the choice to italicize the line "because of the thorns, that's why" I think only doing the italics once makes it oddly stand out against the rest of the poem. So if that's not the single most important line in the poem, I would either italicize two portions or remove the italics altogether. Quirky formatting is awesome, but if its only done once in a piece it ends up seeming random rather than purposeful in my opinion.

Another thing that bothered me is that the red rose is both described for it's "purity" and then later for it's taking away the "innocence" of the yellow rose. I feel like this is contradictory but maybe I'm misunderstanding those two lines.

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Overall, this was a beautiful poem, and I'm happy you went back to it to make some edits and bring it back to YWS. The word-choice is elegant and the imagery is memorable. Well done!

~alliyah

This review courtesy of

Hi honeymoon! I'm here for a quick review

So I love to poem, but I would recommend capitalizing the first letters of 'sentences' and trying to make separate stanzas to help the look of the poem(Granted, I haven't figured out how to make stanzas in YWS yet xD). I wasn't sure how I felt about the switch from scarlet roses to yellow and pink roses, but it makes sense now that I have finished to poem, even though it didn't make sense as I was reading it. I usually don't ignore the thorns on roses, but I get what you mean. Anyways, overall great poem! Keep up the great work!

Happy Cake Day, darling <3 this poem is lovely