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[A rose has thorns as well as honey,]

1830 –

1894

A rose has thorns as well as honey,
I’ll not have her for love or money;
An iris grows so straight and fine,
That she shall be no friend of mine;
Snowdrops like the snow would chill me;
Nightshade would caress and kill me;
Crocus like a spear would fright me;
Dragon’s-mouth might bark or bite me;
Convolvulus but blooms to die;
A wind-flower suggests a sigh;
Love-lies-bleeding makes me sad;
And poppy-juice would drive me mad:—
But give me holly, bold and jolly,
Honest, prickly, shining holly;
Pluck me holly leaf and berry
For the day when I make merry.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 23, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

Born in 1830 in London, Christina Rossetti, the author of Goblin Market and Other Poems, is a major Victorian Poet.

About Christina Rossetti

Themes

About this Poem

“[A rose has thorns as well as honey]” appears in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (George Routledge, 1872). In “Sound, Sense, and Structure in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song,” published in Children’s Literature, vol. 22 (1994), Sharon Smulders, a former professor in the department of English, languages, and cultures at Mount Royal University, writes, “Uninterested in budding or blossoming womanhood at this point in the volume, Rossetti now refrains from giving priority to the rose’s beauty. Later still, the feminine rose is wholly repudiated: ‘A rose has thorns as well as honey, / I’ll not have her for love or money.’ Recalling ‘Wee Wee Husband’ and ‘What Does the Bee Do?,’ the end-rhymes ‘honey’ and ‘money’ infect the rose with the taint of sexual and commercial exchange. The speaker instead responds to the needs of the approaching winter, choosing ‘holly, bold and jolly, / Honest, prickly, shining holly.’”

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More by this poet

A Christmas Carol

In the bleak mid-winter
   Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
   Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
   Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter 
   Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
   Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
   When He comes to reign:
In the bleak midwinter
   A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty
   Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim
   Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
   And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
   Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
   Which adore.

Angels an

Christina Rossetti

2011

A Coast-Nightmare

I have a friend in ghostland—
   Early found, ah me, how early lost!—
Blood-red seaweeds drip along that coastland
   By the strong sea wrenched and tossed.
In every creek there slopes a dead man’s islet,
   And such an one in every bay;
All unripened in the unended twilight:

Christina Rossetti

1896

from "Diverse Worlds, Time and Eternity"

The half moon shows a face of plaintive sweetness
Ready and poised to wax or wane;
A fire of pale desire in incompleteness,
Tending to pleasure or to pain:—
Lo, while we gaze she rolleth on in fleetness
To perfect loss or perfect gain.
Half bitterness we know, we know half sweetness;

Christina Rossetti

1893

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[A rose has thorns as well as honey,]

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