Tell her that wastes her time and me.
"Go, Lovely Rose", by Edmund Waller, is a passionate lyrical poem in which a youthful man expresses his intense understanding of the importance of love.He sends a rose to his beloved to "Tell her that [she] wastes her time and me [him]" (2) by acting shy and staying out of sight. This young lover is trying to tell his beloved that their time is too short for all things trivial. In sending the rose, his purpose is to show her what glory and happiness can come in forgetting society and letting her feelings free to show her a more magical path through life. The speaker of this poem tries to convey the importance of his message, this eagerness of his, by suggesting they enjoy their moment in love.
In the first stanza, the young lover is commanding a rose to go and deliver a message of the urgency of his love to his sweetheart. He commands the rose to "tell her" that she is wasting their precious youth by acting ignorant when she knows that he admires her. He "resembles her to thee [the rose]" (4), and discovers "How sweet and fair she seems to be" (5). He uses the rose as a metaphoric symbol of her beauty. He compares her to the rose because, like all humans (yes, even women.!) roses are momentarily beautiful, but fades and lasts only for a certain time. By this comparison, readers can understand what value beauty really carries in itself. It almost seems that everything is beautiful when one has been "pricked by a thorn of love". .
In the second stanza, the speaker is trying to convey a message of modesty through the rose. Suggesting that his love should throw off her "robe of modesty" and show off her beauty while she can. He understands that she is young "And shuns to have her graces spied," (7), but he wants the world to see her beauty and admire her for it. He wants to feel the pride of having such beauty at his side while other suitors may show eyes of envy from afar.
