Chanson explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Love and Loss

  The poem contrasts gifts for the beloved with symbols of the speaker's own death, highlighting the pain of unrequited or doomed love.

• Transience and Mortality

  Imagery of the hempen rope, narrow bed, cypress, rue, and lilies underscores the inevitability of death and the fleeting nature of life.

Characters to notice

• Love

  Implied as the recipient of the speaker's devotion and the subject of the contrasting gifts.

• Death

  Referenced through imagery of the hempen rope, narrow bed, cypress, rue, and lilies at the head.

Key passages

• “A ring of gold and a milk-white dove / Are goodly gifts for thee, / And a hempen rope for your own love / To hang upon a tree.”

  You receive precious tokens of love, while your beloved is destined for execution by hanging.

  Sets up the central contrast between the addressee's fortune and the lover's tragic end.

• “For you a House of Ivory, / (Roses are white in the rose-bower)! / A narrow bed for me to lie, / (White, O white, is the hemlock flower)!”

  You have a beautiful home, but I have only a grave.

  Juxtaposes luxury with death using floral symbols.

• “Myrtle and jessamine for you, / (O the red rose is fair to see)! / For me the cypress and the rue, / (Fairest of all is rosemary)!”

  You receive fragrant, joyful flowers, while I am given funeral plants.

  Further contrast between life-affirming and death-associated flora.

• “For you three lovers of your hand, / (Green grass where a man lies dead)! / For me three paces on the sand, / (Plant lilies at my head)!”

  You have three suitors, but I have only a grave marked by lilies.

  Final stanza reinforces the speaker's lonely death versus the addressee's romantic fortune.