Fifty Shades of Roses: 50 of the best poems about everyones favourite flower
About this audiobook
Many would agree that there is one flower, the rose, that embodies both the human condition, its ambitions, its sacrifices and its symbolism of devoted love that together with its own peerless self; the beauty of its perfume, its hues and colours, its shapes and forms, from rambler and climber to the stately grace of a rose bed, and, of course, its thorns, to warn that consequences carry a price.
Poets know that a rose is perhaps able to speak in many tongues on many subjects and it is therefore unsurprising that the rose is one of the great enduring symbols of the tradition in both Western and Eastern poetry.
A rose can bring a tremble of the lip, or raise the beating of a heart. They can create a mood or simplify a feeling. Their message can be direct or nuanced but so often it is just perfect.
Our classic poets from Hafiz, D H Lawrence, Robert Burns and Shakespeare, along with very many others, explore this beautiful living symbol with their exquisite lines and verse.
1 - Fifty Shades of Roses - An Introduction
2 - The Year of the Rose by Algernon Charles Swinburne
3 - A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns
4 - Rosa Rosarum by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson
5 - Venus in the Garden by James Weldon Johnson
6 - A White Rose by John Boyle O'Reilly
7 - Rosa Mundi by Arthur Symons
8 - Rose of All the World by D H Lawrence
9 - To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick
10 - Go Lovely Rose by Edmund Waller
11 - To Roses in the Bosom of Castara by William Habington
12 - Gloire de Dijon by D H Lawrence
13 - Sonnet 130 - My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun by William Shakespeare
14 - Sonnet 109 - O! Never Say That I Was False of Heart by William Shakespeare
15 - My Rose by Hildegarde Hawthorn
16 - A Ballad of Dreamland by Algernon Charles Swinburne
17 - Roses of a Dream by Damon Runyon
18 - Sonnet 54 - O! How Much More Doth Beauty Beauteous Seem by William Shakespeare
19 - Sonnet 99 - The Forward Violet Thus Did I Chide by William Shakespeare
20 - In an Eastern Rosegarden by Pirani Ameena Begum
21 - Early Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
22 - No Rose That in a Garden Ever Grew by Edna St Vincent Millay
23 - The Secret Rose by W B Yeats
24 - The Rose by John Cournos
25 - Where Roses Would Not Dare to Go by Emily Dickinson
26 - Amid the Roses by Alice Dunbar Nelson
27 - How Did the Rose by Hafiz
28 - A Flower Given to My Daughter by James Joyce
29 - To a Friend Who Sent Me Roses by John Keats
30 - The Sweets of the Rose by Hafiz
31 - A Rose by Sir Richard Fanshawe
32 - The Rose Has Flushed Red by Hafiz
33 - London Roses by Willa Silbert Cather
34 - Laughing Rose by William Henry Davies
35 - A Wild Rose by Alfred Austin
36 - June by Francis Ledwidge
37 - Tis the Last Rose of Summer by Thomas Moore
38 - Virtue by George Herbert
39 - Summer in England, 1914 by Alice Meynell
40 - The Rose Has Left the Garden by Richard Le Gallienne
41 - Summer is Ended by Christina Rossetti
42 - Written in September, 1804 by Christian Milne
43 - Love in Autumn by Sara Teasdale
44 - September by George Arnold
45 - An October Garden by Christina Georgina Rossetti
46 - Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire by James Russell Lowell
47 - My Winter Rose by Alfred Austin
48 - Winter by Robert Louis Stevenson
49 - The December Rose by Edith Nesbit
50 - Winter Sunset by Katharine
