The aesthetics of surprise in Waller’s ‘Song’ (‘Go,lovely Rose’)

Abstract

Edmund Waller’s ‘Song’ (‘Go, lovely Rose’) ends shockingly: when the rose, which had been acting as a gently chiding intermediary between the speaker and the beloved, is suddenly commanded to perish. But this surprise is prepared for by a host of imperceptible effects, making readers experience the surprise as, paradoxically, an inevitable one. The quietness of the anticipatory effects may account for why this poem has occasioned such scant critical commentary despite it being one of the masterpieces of the late English Renaissance.