"I Am Like a Rose" by D.H. Lawrence

     David Herbert Lawrence, or more commonly known as D.H. Lawrence was an English poet and writer. He was born on September 11th, 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England and he died on March 2nd, 1930 in Vence, France.  During his comparatively short writing career he amassed fame, but also was heavily criticized and persecuted. He attended the University of Nottingham and was part of the Modernist literary time period.

I am myself at last; now I achieve

My very self, I, with the wonder mellow,

Full of fine warmth, I issue forth in clear

And single me, perfected from my fellow.

Here I am all myself. No rose-bush heaving

Its limpid sap to culmination has brought

Itself more sheer and naked out of the

In stark-clear roses, than I to myself am brought.

     In this poem we see D.H. Lawrence compare himself to a flower, this is symbolic of freedom, but at the same time remembering your roots, because as we know rose-bushes are connected to the Earth and the Earth is the mother of us, so in a symbolic sense we are all connected through her. The rose he is describing shows that he is finally free just as this rose for example he says, "...Itself more sheer and naked out of the green In stark-clear roses, than I to myself am brought". This example hints at an analogy between flowers and people. It speaks to the bloom of us. We are all beautiful in our own ways, just as the flower sticks out in a green world, we stick out in a world centered around the superficial and not the feelings and emotions of us. Lawrence blends the metaphor of flower and human being seamlessly, because they are two completely unalike things, but at the same time they can represent very similar things. Lawrence uses these elements of analogy, symbolism, and metaphor to link the physical and spiritual sides of a human to that of a blooming rose bush in a sea of green, just as we are people in a sea of other human beings. We are all the same, but we are all different, just as the rose is. As a reader and an enlightened person on D.H. Lawrence we can assume he is making these connections through the use of these devices, because of the persecution he faced, because of ideas that the "pack" did not consider to be socially acceptable at that time.