Lanier gives his soul two flowers to study, one red and one white, and treats each as a teacher. "Rose-Morals" works like a pair of small fables. Each flower stands for a different virtue, and both lessons are about how art is made. The central idea appears in the very first stanza. A rose takes a "clod of misery," the dull earth it grows in, and distils it into "delight." The poet wants his songs to do the same, turning what is heavy and dark in him into something others can breathe in.
The red rose teaches courage. The speaker asks his soul to "bare thy breast / As yon red rose, and dare the day," and the verbs matter. Daring and baring suggest that making art is a kind of exposure, a willingness to be seen. The rose manages this without strain, since it is "clean, and large, and calm with velvet rest." The calm sits oddly beside the daring, and that is the point: the speaker wants boldness without anxiety. The urgent repetition of "Say yea -- say yea!" shows how hard he finds it. Then comes the farewell. The wind picks up and the rose loses its petals, which the speaker calls "leaves." He gives permission for it in a gentle half-line, "so; drift away," and then makes the comparison explicit. He hopes his songs will leave him as freely as petals leave the flower. The section ends on a humble note. He says only "I strive, I pray," and claims no achievement.
The form supports this. Both halves use three quatrains rhymed ABAB, and the line lengths follow the same pattern in every stanza. They run from about six syllables to eight to ten, then drop to a short four-syllable line: "Into delight," "Say yea," "I strive, I pray," "Thy work, thy fate." Each stanza swells like a bloom opening, then closes on a short phrase that sounds like a petal falling or a breath let out. In a poem so concerned with breath and fragrance, that rhythm suits the subject.
The white tuberose reverses the first lesson. The red rose faces outward, but now the soul is told to go inward: "get thee to the heart / Of yonder tuberose: hide thee there." Exposure gives way to concealment, and the daring of the first half becomes devotion. What the soul does in hiding is "breathe the meditations of thine art / Suffused with prayer." Breath, fragrance and spirit become almost interchangeable. The flower's scent rises "grave yet light," and its whiteness is "rich" as well as pure. The single word "Virginities!" is plural and set alone, so the flowers seem to multiply into a crowd of blossoms. The rhyme with "uprise" stretches the sound a little, as if the word itself were reaching.
The final stanza is the bluntest in the poem. The white flower's purity is "Mulched with unsavory death," and the poem returns to the dirt it began with. Mulch is rotting matter, and the whiteness feeds on it. The soul is told to grow "unto such white estate" that "virginal-prayerful art shall be thy breath, / Thy work, thy fate." The hyphenated compound packs purity and prayer into a single adjective, and the last three words equate art with breath, labour and destiny.
The two halves give the poem its shape. Red stands for public courage, white for private devotion, and the speaker wants both. The poem is also honest about where beauty comes from. It does not pretend that songs spring from lovely feelings. It says they come out of "misery" and "unsavory death," and that the artist's task is to transform that material. Words like "yon," "yonder" and "could'st" give the poem a formal, old-fashioned tone, yet the idea behind it is simple enough for anyone who has tried to make something out of a bad day. Its ambition is small but real, and the closing "I strive, I pray" makes that plain.