"Roses are red" is one of the most familiar openings in English, and almost anyone can finish the verse before being asked. icvetea counts on that. The poem begins with the old line and then stumbles: "Hold up, I mean." Four words are enough to stop the rhyme, and the rest of the poem explains why it needed stopping.
The correction is the key to the poem. "Roses are red" is a present-tense claim, a cheerful fact that is always true, and the speaker realizes it no longer holds. So the second stanza starts again in the past: "Roses were red. / Violents were blue." The verb is the whole difference. What follows is the rhyme in its usual role as a small compliment, "Honey so sweet. / And so are you," but the sweetness now sounds like something remembered. Then the third stanza finishes the thought: "the roses are shriveled," the "violents aren't blue," "All the flowers are gone." The central idea is that a comforting formula can't survive loss. The poem borrows a form built for promises and uses it to record their ending.
The construction is quietly clever. The nursery-rhyme pattern depends on a rhyme you can predict, and the poem keeps just enough of it to make the gaps hurt. In both full stanzas, "blue" is the anchor: it rhymes with "you" in the second stanza and "too" in the third. The first stanza gets no such reward. "Red" and "mean" don't rhyme, and the stanza is only two lines long, as though the poem has been cut off before it could settle. The last line also echoes the earlier one. "And so are you" becomes "And i will be too." The "you" is replaced by "i," and the present "are" by the future "will be." The speaker moves into the space where the beloved was, and the repeated sound makes the shift feel inevitable rather than melodramatic.
Rhythm does similar work. The lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, which gives the poem a skipping, playground beat. Against that, "But now, the roses are shriveled" is the longest and slowest line, and the rough, dry word "shriveled" slows the music at the moment the flowers wither. After it, the lines go flat and plain: "All the flowers are gone." There is no metaphor and no dramatic adjective. The bare statement is what makes it bleak.
Color carries much of the imagery. Red and blue are the poem's only colors, and in the third stanza one of them is taken away: the violets "aren't blue." Readers often link red with passion and blue with sadness, so I would suggest, cautiously, that the title "Red And Blue" hints at both feelings. The odd spelling "violents" is worth a pause. It may simply be a slip for "violets," and the poem doesn't tell us otherwise. But the word also contains "violent," and a reader can hear a harsher note under the pretty flower. The title's "30" is left unexplained, and the poem gives no clue to its meaning, so it is best to notice the mystery rather than guess.
The ending leaves the most open. "And i will be too" does not say what "gone" means for the speaker: leaving, fading away, or something more final. The lowercase "i," which might be a typing habit or might be deliberate, makes the speaker look small beside the capitalized lines around it. Because the poem never explains itself, the final line carries a weight that a longer, more detailed ending might have lost.
The poem matters because it shows how much a familiar form can do in a few lines. It begins almost like a joke, with a self-interrupting speaker and a casual "Hold up," and by the last stanza the humor has drained away. That shift from play to grief is hard to manage in twelve short lines. The poem manages it by letting the old rhyme fail in front of us.