![]() The violet, as against the rose, is a shrinking flower, hiding itself in shadows. It is perhaps significant that the British Labor Party has replaced the fierce expanse of its Red Flag with a trailing, half-closed, wispy, wimpy Red Rose, feminine and nonaggressive, and indeed not solidly red but only vaguely and streakily so. The red rose, in this context, can be attacking or attacked. Herbert's exquisite uncolored adjectives for his clearly red rose - his "hue angrie and brave" - denote riddlingly a woman defending her virtue, or a flag of attack. The color red is also associated with aggression and threat. The rose can be seen as the analogue of the female sex organs, penetrated by busy bees or invisible worms, and bleeding. Rose red is the color of blushing and thus of flesh engorged by blood and excited by sexual passion (as Christopher Ricks has pointed out in his work on blushing in "Keats and Embarrassment"). Or we might take a look at Herbert's poem "Vertue," where he apostrophizes the rose: "My luve is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June,"where the poet feels the need to stress the redness, even redundantly. The effect of the starkness of the statement "Roses are red" is to move the reader's mind toward a kind of absolute, uncompromising state of mind, signified by the primary color. In both cases there has been a subtraction of white, which, as we shall see, has considerable significance. Pink is not red, nor is violet-mauve blue. What an alert deconstructionist must immediately observe is that the two flower words are, in many other languages besides English, also color nouns or adjectives, though in neither case does the meaning of the flower color coincide with the attributed color in the poem. This statement, like the following statement about violets, consists of a noun, a flower name, followed by one of those ambivalent color adjectives that have half the status of nouns and occasion endless discussion among philosophers as to the nature of the quality of "redness" and whether or not it "inheres" in the object. My reading of the Valentine quatrain cannot therefore offer itself as definitive, but it can, I think, illuminate this deceptively simple text, tease out, or, as we say, "unpack" some surprising implications. All texts read all other texts, and, according to modern theories of intertextuality, modern texts may read older ones. We know now, thanks to Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists, that words have no necessary or stable meaning but take their place in the shifting and endless tissue or text of language, of which we are all a part. Recent critical developments have made it possible to extend this insight to a mass of other apparently "innocent" work. That wise critic Frank Kermode observed justly that it was not until the second half of the 20th century that Keats was seen to be a "difficult" poet. Send us feedback.Roses are red,Violets are blue,Sugar is sweetAnd so are you. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'hue and cry.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2022 When Tom Cruise took on the role for what would be two films, a hue and cry was heard across Jack Reacher Land. 2022 After a hue and cry, online applications arrived, but still, only 4,000 visas were granted as of Monday, even as the continent hosts a legion of 2.8 million refugees and growing. 2022 Produced in November 2020, before the hue and cry over blockchain’s environmental impact hit the mainstream, the artwork uses the NFT format to present how carbon markets could be brought on-chain. Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, The public hue and cry to change Cleveland’s outfield apparently did not register with the front office. 2022 Suddenly, Republicans are raising a hue and cry about getting serious about mental health. 2011 Once the Supreme Court invalidates the order, the usual hue and cry about the court being a tool of conservatives will begin. ![]() 2023 But this is the usual hue and cry, with nothing really new. Recent Examples on the Web When Tom Cruise took on the role for what would be two films, a hue and cry was heard across Jack Reacher Land.
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