Roses Are Red - Origins

Origins

The origins of the poem may be traced at least as far back as to the following lines written in 1590 by Sir Edmund Spenser from his epic The Faerie Queene (Book Three, Canto 6, Stanza 6):

It was upon a Sommers shynie day,
When Titan faire his beames did display,
In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew,
She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;
She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,
And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.

A nursery rhyme significantly closer to the modern cliché Valentine's Day poem can be found in Gammer Gurton's Garland, a 1784 collection of English nursery rhymes:

The rose is red, the violet's blue,
The honey's sweet, and so are you.
Thou are my love and I am thine;
I drew thee to my Valentine:
The lot was cast and then I drew,
And Fortune said it shou'd be you.

Victor Hugo was likely familiar with Spenser, but may not have known the English nursery rhyme when, in 1862, he published the novel Les Misérables. Hugo was a poet as well as a novelist, and within the text of the novel are many songs. One sung by the character, Fantine, contains this refrain, in the 1862 English translation:

We will buy very pretty things
A-walking through the faubourgs.
Violets are blue, roses are red,
Violets are blue, I love my loves.

The last two lines in the original French are:

Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,
Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.

(Les Misérables, Fantine, Book Seven, Chapter Six)

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Famous quotes containing the word origins:

    “Lucretius
    Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
    smiling carves dreams, bright cells
    Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
    —Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)

    “The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
    —Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

    “Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
    —W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)