June’s Birthday Blossom is the beautiful rose.
So much has been said of the rose. Poets have sung its glories, painters have displayed its beauty, and Cupid has single-handedly made it the most popular flower in the world. The star of the show on Valentine’s Day and at weddings, a popular addition on cakes, and a common motif on consumer goods, it does not seem an exaggeration to say there are roses everywhere.
In the Western world of today, the rose represents love. Given as a gift or populating a bridal bouquet, roses prompt us to matters of the heart. In medieval times, the rose had a more varied significance and was a symbol of many things – purity, luxury, the Virgin Mary, and the royal houses of York and Lancaster, amongst others. One of the most significant associations was the idea of chivalry.
The association of the rose with chivalry, and its manifestation in courtly romance, abounded in medieval culture. For example, the medieval period was the age of the troubadours, poet-musicians who entertained southern France and northern Italy by composing and performing poems which exclaimed chivalry and romance. (Hard to believe, but poetry was a significant form of entertainment.) Many of these poems featured roses, including one of the most popular, the Roman de la Rose/Romance of the Rose, written in the 13th century. The term “roman” was not used because the poem was romantic, but rather because of the language in which it was composed. The term referred to any work that was written in early French, which, as a legacy of the Roman Empire, was called “roman.” Eventually, certain concepts or sentiments that were featured in French romans came to be called “romantic.” Nonetheless, romance as we understand it is front and center in the poem.
Roman de la Rose was written by two poets. The original poet was Guillaume de Lorris/William of the Loire, a scholar from Orleans. He composed an allegorical poem in rhyming couplets designed to encompass the art of courtly love, and to be a model of romance. In the poem, the narrator dreams he is in a Garden of Love. In this garden every known flower blooms, birds sing, and couples who personify the gallant life – Mirth, Gladness, Courtesy, Beauty – dance. The dreamer sees a rose lovelier than all the beauty which surrounds it, guarded by a thousand thorns. The rose is a symbol of the narrator’s Beloved and his longing to pick the rose is an allegory of the amorous arts.
Guillaume died before he finished the poem. Forty years later, another Frenchman, Jean de Meung, picked it up and completed it with thousands of lines that were very different from the verse of Guillaume. During the forty-year gap the age of satire had begun. The zeitgeist of medieval culture shifted from romance to reason, resulting in a tone quite distinct from the original portion of the poem. Jean de Meung did nod to the romantic intent by consenting to a happy ending to the poem, when the God of Love storms the tower where Danger, Shame, and Fear guard the Rose. Welcome admits the narrator to the inner shrine and lets him pluck the rose.
Roman de la Rose was one of the three most widely read books in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, suggesting that love was as popular then as it is now. Many things have changed since the Middle Ages, but romance keeps kicking.
The rose, of course, can represent sentiments other than romantic ones. Yellow roses are given as a sign of friendship, pink roses represent joy, and white roses, in addition to weddings, are also used to express condolences at a funeral. And for June babies, the rose is your Birthday Blossom, a beautiful celebration of you on the day of your birth.
We wish you a happy birthday, a happy June, and the happiest of summers.