W. H. Davies’s “Laughing Rose” is a small lyric of flirtatious envy. The speaker addresses a woman called Rose who can meet the wind and rain with laughter, and he wishes not simply to be near her but to be the weather itself—April, with its power to touch, tousle, and tease. That is the central impulse: a longing to inhabit the season’s freedom rather than remain a separate, watching self.
The construction works like a charm or a repeated wish. The first two stanzas open with the same conditional formula, “If I were gusty April now” and “If I were merry April now,” so the poem unfolds as speculation. Each stanza follows the same shape—three lines of four stresses, then a shorter final line of three stresses: “And all her hair come loose,” “Of her vermilion flowers,” “To play with laughing Rose.” That shortening acts as a release, the metrical equivalent of a sigh. Rhyme is handled just as lightly. The second stanza gives the full chime of “showers” and “flowers”; the last stanza rhymes “blows” with “Rose.” The first stanza, by contrast, keeps its line endings more open, linking “Rose” and “loose” by sibilance rather than a perfect rhyme. The loose, song-like pattern suits a poem about wind.
Davies’s imagery is active rather than pictorial. In the first stanza the speaker imagines being “gusty April” so he could “blow at laughing Rose,” and that blowing would undo her: “I’d make her ribbons slip their knots, / And all her hair come loose.” The verbs matter—blow, slip, come loose—because they express contact as motion. Rose is both a person and a flower, and her name lets the image hover between a woman’s loosened hair and a bloom stirred by wind. April is repeatedly personified, first as “gusty,” then “merry,” and finally “wild,” so the speaker is not envying a background season but a living rival.
The second stanza moves from wind to rain. “How I would pelt her cheeks with showers” sounds almost rough, but the next lines transform roughness into bloom: “I’d make carnations, rich and warm, / Of her vermilion flowers.” Her cheeks are already “vermilion flowers,” a red of unusual intensity, and the imagined rain would deepen them into something flesh-like and glowing. The word “carnations” sits exactly at the boundary between flower and skin, reinforced by “rich and warm.” Davies is not describing a landscape; he is imagining weather as touch.
The turn comes with “Since.” Having imagined what he would do as April, the speaker explains why he wants it: “Since she will laugh in April’s face, / No matter how he rains or blows—” Rose is not passive. Weather can tug her hair and wet her cheeks, but she answers with laughter. That laughter is her power, and it is the thing the speaker wants to meet. The final exclamation, “Then O that I wild April were, / To play with laughing Rose,” is an inversion that feels older and more urgent than ordinary speech. “Wild April” and “laughing Rose” are pushed together as the poem’s true pair.
The poem’s significance lies in its compression. It has no story, no moral, and no extended scene. Instead, it catches a single fleeting desire—to be the gusty, merry, wild force that can make someone laugh—and turns it into a lyric shape. The repeated phrase “laughing Rose” at the opening and close acts like a refrain, while the conditionals make the whole poem a spell of possibility. Davies suggests that desire is not always about ownership; sometimes it is only about play, and about wanting to be the wind that gets to join in.