Sompsin's "Rose" opens like a still life and ends like a gentle haunting. The first two lines place a flower in a field, but the language is already stranger than plain description would need. The rose is "crocheted with temperate thorns," and the verb matters. Crochet is handwork: slow, looped, domestic, soft. A rose that is crocheted rather than grown seems made with care, and its thorns, the flower's usual warning, are "temperate," which means moderate and held in check. The word also hints at a mild climate, which suits a poem that ends in Spring. Before anything happens, danger has already been softened.
The central idea seems to be consolation: something innocent and fragile can become a lasting comfort, present in sleep and waking alike. The poem reaches this idea through a quiet change in how it speaks of the rose. In the third line the flower slips into a person: "Her blissful innocence contrasts against the grey greenery." The pronoun arrives without announcement, and "innocence" is a human quality. The phrase "grey greenery" is a small clash of its own, a colour that denies the thing it describes. Judging by the imagery, the grey could be dull weather or the speaker's mood, but either way it makes the white rose shine more brightly.
Then comes the shortest line, "I hear her." It is the only complete stop in the poem, and the poem stops to listen. Until now the speaker has only looked. From here the rose is something heard, and the poem moves from sight to sound, from observation to relationship. What she is stays open. The capital letters on "White Rose" make it read almost like a name, and the title could be a flower or a girl called Rose. The detail that the speaker sees her "only in the field and by the lake" suggests, as an inference, a figure of memory or imagination. The poem never settles this, and that ambiguity is part of its charm.
The pairing of "dreams" and "reality" gives the middle lines a balanced, almost lullaby-like shape: "Her voice calls to me in my dreams / And comforts me in my reality." The verbs escalate. To "call" is to summon from a distance, while to "comfort" is to arrive and stay. The voice crosses the border between sleep and waking and grows warmer as it does.
The most interesting word is "soliloquies." A soliloquy is speech to oneself, which an audience overhears, as in a play. So the rose sings "sweet soliloquies" that are not directed at the speaker, even though her voice "calls to me." The speaker is an eavesdropper, and the comfort comes from being allowed to listen. The sibilance of "Singing sweet soliloquies" makes the line sound like the hush it describes.
The last line, "Remedied by the blossoming flowers of Spring," is deliberately loose. "Remedied" is a medical word, but the grammar does not say what is healed. It might be the song, the speaker, or the whole grey scene. With no punctuation after it, the poem ends with the song still going. Spring, capitalised like the White Rose, works as a final proper name for renewal.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme. The lines swing from three syllables ("I hear her.") to about fifteen, and the long third line spills out as if admiration won't fit in a neat measure. Sound patterns do the work rhyme might have done: the g-r of "grey greenery," the soft s's of "sweet soliloquies," the matching b's of "blissful" and "blossoming."
Not every phrase is equally fresh. "Blissful innocence" is a familiar pairing, and it works best because stranger words surround it. The poem's real interest lies in its small turns: from "it" to "her," from seeing to hearing, from dreaming to waking, from grey to Spring. In nine lines it shows how a poem can turn a picture of a flower into the feeling of being kept company.