Flora Unveiled

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where Narcissus met his death, he sees the reflection of a beautiful rosebud (the virginal

Lady) behind the hedge of a rosary. At this very moment, Cupid wounds him with five

arrows, and the young man falls desperately in love with the rosebud.

Eventually, with the help of “Fair Welcome” (symbolizing the Lady’s positive response),

the lover manages to persuade “Danger” (symbolizing her ability to dominate her lover) to

allow him to pass through the hedge surrounding the rosary. The lover approaches the Rose

and is delighted to discover that its corolla

Had not yet spread so as to show the seed,

Which still was by the petals well concealed,

That stood up straight and with their tender folds

Hid well the grains with which the bud was filled.

In other words, the Rose was still virginal. Precisely how to interpret the hidden

“seed” and the “grains” is unclear, but they clearly portray the Rose’s concealed sexual-

ity as a kind of hidden treasure. The lover then asks Fair Welcome’s permission to kiss

the rose, and when Venus herself appears and supports the lover’s request, permission is

granted:

Nor did I linger, but at once did take

A sweet and savory lipful from the Rose.

Let no man ask if then I felt delight!

My senses quickly were in perfume drowned

That purged my body from its pain, and soothed

The woes of love that had so bitter been.

But the young man’s ecstasy is short- lived. “Jealousy” is aroused and imprisons both Fair

Welcome and the Rose in a castle surrounded by a moat. Lorris’s poem ends with the lover

despairing of ever seeing his Rose again.

The finales of the two alternative additions to “The Romance of the Rose” differ starkly in

tone, complexity, and subtext. In the anonymous seventy- eight line conclusion, “Dame Pity”

and her allies visit the Lover and tell him how, with Cupid’s help, they had stormed the castle

and rescued the Rose. “Dame Beauty” presents him with the Rose, with which he is now free

to do whatever he pleases without fear of “contravention”:

There at our ease we took great delight;

The tender grass provided us a bed;

The rosebush petals fair made coverlets;

And all that night we nothing did but kiss

And satisfaction find in other joys.

We infer that the bud opened her petals in response to her Lover’s caresses, for when

Dame  Beauty appears to take the Rose back to her castle, the Lover refers to her as “the

b l o s s o m”: