'The Red, Red Passionate Rose'—Eco & Masefield on Rose Symbolism

In his fascinating Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco writes that he chose the title of his bestselling debut novel in large part because ‘the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left: Dante’s mystic rose, and go lovely rose, the Wars of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose by any other name, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicrucians.’ [1] I was reminded of this afresh today when I acquired a new addition to my John Masefield collection—The Poems and Plays of John Masefield, Vol. 1: Poems—and read again in ‘The Ballad of Sir Bors’ a striking use of rose symbolism for one particular thing: Christ’s precious blood contained in the Holy Grail.

Would I could win some quiet and rest, and a little ease,
In the cool grey hush of the dusk, in the dim green place of the trees,
Where the birds are singing, singing, singing, crying aloud
The song of the red, red rose that blossoms beyond the seas.

Would I could see it, the rose, when the light begins to fail,
And a lone white star in the West is glimmering on the mail;
The red, red passionate rose of the sacred blood of the Christ,
In the shining chalice of God, the cup of the Holy Grail.

The dusk comes gathering grey, and the darkness dims the West,
The oxen low to the byre, and all bells ring to rest;
But I ride over the moors, for the dusk still bides and waits,
That brims my soul with the glow of the rose that ends the Quest.

My horse is spavined and ribbed, and his bones come through his hide,
My sword is rotten with rust, but I shake the reins and ride,
For the bright white birds of God that nest in the rose have called,
And never a township now is a town where I can bide.

It will happen at last, at dusk, as my horse limps down the fell,
A star will glow like a note God strikes on a silver bell,
And the bright white birds of God will carry my soul to Christ,
And the sight of the Rose, the Rose, will pay for the years of hell. [2]

Eco himself has elsewhere described at length the dangers of overinterpretation, noting the ‘indisputable fact . . . that from a certain point of view everything bears relationships of analogy, contiguity and similarity to everything else.’ He then goes on to write, ‘But the difference between the sane interpretation and paranoiac interpretation lies in recognizing that this relationship is minimal, and not, on the contrary, deducing from this minimal relationship the maximum possible.’ [3] While Eco is consciously exploiting the dangers of such overinterpretation in the title of The Name of the Rose—and indeed, it seems to be a recurring theme in his fiction and nonfiction alike—Masefield has made things quite simple for us. His rose is the ‘red, red passionate rose of the sacred blood of the Christ, / In the shining chalice of God, the cup of the Holy Grail.’ I cannot help but think that here we have reached the uppermost possibility of symbolic or analogical deferral.


[1] Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, tr. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 3.

[2] John Masefield, The Poems & Plays of John Masefield, Vol. 1: Poems (NY: Macmillan, 1919), pp. 79-80.

[3] Umberto Eco, Interpretation & overinterpretation, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, & Christine Brooke-Rose, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1994), p. 48.