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Love poem and children's rhyme From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Roses Are Red" is the name of a love poem and children's rhyme with Roud Folk Song Index number 19798.[1] It has become a cliché for Valentine's Day, and has spawned multiple humorous and parodic variants.
"Roses Are Red" | |
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![]() William Wallace Denslow's illustrations for "The rose is red", from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose | |
Nursery rhyme |
A modern standard version is:[2]
Roses are red
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.
The rhyme builds on poetic conventions that are traceable as far back as Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene of 1590:
A rhyme similar to the modern standard version can be found in Gammer Gurton's Garland, a 1784 collection of English nursery rhymes published in London by Joseph Johnson:[4]
Victor Hugo was probably familiar with Spenser, but may not have known the English nursery rhyme when he published his novel Les Misérables in 1862. A song by the character Fantine contains this refrain:[6]
Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,
Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.
In his English translation published in the same year, Charles Edwin Wilbour rendered this as:[7]
Violets are blue, roses are red,
Violets are blue, I love my loves.
This translation replaces the original version's cornflowers ("bleuets") with violets, and makes the roses red rather than pink, effectively making the song closer to the English nursery rhyme.
The short poem has since become a snowclone, and numerous satirical versions have long circulated in children's lore.[8] Among them:
Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Onions stink.
And so do you.[9]
Country music singer Roger Miller parodied the poem in a verse of his 1964 hit "Dang Me":
They say roses are red and violets are purple
Sugar's sweet and so is maple syruple. [sic][10]
The Marx Brothers' film Horse Feathers has Chico Marx describing the symptoms of cirrhosis thus:
Cirrhosis are red,
so violets are blue,
so sugar is sweet,
so so are you.[11]
The Benny Hill version:
Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it weren't for Christmas
We'd all be Jewish.[12]
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