Stanza 1 Summary

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

• Well, this poem seems short enough, so let's just knock this out in a jif—wait a minute. A rose wearing a dress? On second thought, maybe there's more to this than meets the eye. Let's try to tackle this bit by bit, then.
• First up: the title. We can see that this is… "III," and this is the third poem in the book. Well, that seems to check out, right? We don't get any more info than that (for more, check out "What's Up with the Title?"), so we'll head over to line 1.
• Ah, it seems like we have a speaker on our hands—and a bossy one at that. He's demanding some answers (we're just going to say that our speaker's a "he" at this point, since we have no evidence to the contrary—for more check out our "Speaker" section). More specifically, he's demanding answers from us, giving us a direct command. Sheesh—we're just two words in and already we're getting bossed around.
• Okay then, Mr. Speaker, what do you want to know? The question he lays on us is… well, different.
• The question concerns a rose, which is a pretty common symbol in poetry (we're looking at you Robbie Burns). Our speaker wants to know if the rose is "naked/ or is that her only dress?"
• Hmm. This is a toughie. Can flowers wear clothes? And if they could, would they wear dresses? How about a nice pair of jorts?
• It's likely that our speaker is not being literal here. He doesn't actually think that flowers are nudists, or that they go into their flower-closets and pick out things to wear. Instead, he's using personification to describe the rose in terms of an actual person (a female person, no less). And he's doing that in order to get us to consider something more profound.
• For instance, if we think of a rose's appearance as being "naked," would that be a good thing? We often hear about nature being unspoiled, and the state of being naked means that you aren't concealing anything. So, we could say that a rose is both literally naked (in that it isn't covered up in any way), but it's also not hiding anything. It's a flower, pure and simple—petals, leaves, thorns, that's it. It's not trying to be something it's not.
• But… what if it was? At least, that's the question the speaker is putting to us here. What if the flower was concealing something that we just couldn't see on the surface? What might that be?
• And if there is something more to the rose, why then is it concealing that under its "only" dress? Roses tend to look the same, no matter where you go, so perhaps the speaker is suggesting that what we see when we see a rose is just the "dress" that it wears. In other words, like a thorny Transformer, there is more to the rose than meets the eye.
• Our speaker is definitely in figurative territory here. The question he seems to be asking has more to do with perception than flowers. Is there a reality under the reality of what we can see?
• Well, do you have an answer for him? He's asking you directly, after all.
• Let's get back to him on that, shall we? For now, we'll just direct you to "Symbol: Plants" for more information.
• Oh, and you should also check out "Form and Meter" for all the deets on how this poem is put together.