Richard Lovelace turns a rose into a servant. For five stanzas the speaker barks orders at it, "Haste, haste", and sends it hurrying through a lady's morning: first to her bower, then to her floor, her bed, her hair. Only in the last four lines does the joke land. The flower has bolted from her tresses, and the speaker works out why, with mock-regret: "Because her cheeks are near." The central idea is a compliment disguised as a chase. The lady is so beautiful that the traditional emblem of beauty slinks away in embarrassment.
The form keeps everything light. There are six quatrains of rhyming couplets, and the lines are short, roughly six or seven syllables, so the verse skips along. The repeated commands and exclamation marks give it the breathlessness of someone shooing a flower down a corridor. The rhymes are playful too. Double rhymes such as Flora/Aurora and dresses/tresses give a chiming, faintly comic effect, and Venus/Silenus is a stretch that the poet seems to enjoy. Even the one loose pairing, "coverlet" with "bed", feels more like a quick tumble than a flaw.
The imagery builds the rose up so that it can be knocked down. At first it is "sky-like", and the "long cloudy bed" from which it must "shoot forth" suggests a bud wrapped in layers like cloud. Its "damask head" points to the deep pink-red of a damask rose, and the word also means a rich fabric, which quietly prepares for all the bedding to come. Then comes a burst of classical mythology. The rose is the "new-startled blush of Flora", the goddess of flowers, and "the grief of pale Aurora", the dawn, who "will contest no more". In other words, the rose has beaten the sunrise at its own colour. It is a "vermilion ball" passed "from lip to lip in heaven", a red kiss tossed between gods. Its parents are Venus, goddess of love, and "jolly plump Silenus", a figure of wine and merriment, so the rose is part beauty and part tipsy cheer. The speaker piles up these grand credentials so that the final defeat will be funnier.
The order of the commands matters. The rose moves from the room (the "bower") to the "floor", then to the "bed", then to the "hair". Each step brings it closer to the lady's body, which makes a small, gently daring progression of intimacy. By stanza five the speaker cries "See!" and the job appears done. "Rosy is her bower, / Her floor is all this flower; / Her bed a rosy nest / By a bed of roses pressed." The word "rosy" and the rose itself crowd in until the room is almost smothered. The syntax tilts with "rosy is her bower", and the scene has a soft, drowsy fullness. Notice, too, that the lady herself never appears. We meet her only through her furnishings, as if the speaker were describing a shrine before the goddess steps out.
Then comes the turn. "But early as she dresses" shifts from myth to a homely morning routine, and the question "Why fly you her bright tresses?" makes the rose a runaway. The answer arrives with a little gasp: "Ah! I have found, I fear". The "fear" is pretended, since the speaker plainly delights in the discovery. The rose was ordered to adorn the lady's hair, but the hair sits beside her cheeks, and next to their living colour the flower looks pale. After all those mythic titles (Flora's blush, dawn's rival, Love's coverlet), it loses to a face.
That reversal is what makes the poem worth reading. The comparison of a lover to a rose is about as stock as a compliment can be, and Lovelace avoids the sigh and the solemn vow. He stages a small comedy in which the flower is the one who is flattered, then upstaged. The praise works by exaggeration and surprise rather than by sincerity alone, and the final couplet turns a pile of ornate decoration into a single quick, blushing punchline.