Talk:A Red, Red Rose

Dylan names 'A Red, Red Rose' as "the lyric or verse that had the greatest impact on his life"

Surely this is notable enough for a brief mention in the article?

"As part of an advertising campaign this year, Dylan was asked to name the lyric or verse that had the greatest impact on his life. Rather than quoting his idol Woody Guthrie or poet Dylan Thomas, from whom it is thought that Robert Zimmerman took his name, Dylan selected A Red, Red Rose, written by Robert Burns in 1794."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/06/bob.dylan.robert.burns.inspiration

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/3141308/Bob-Dylan-inspired-by-Scottish-poet-Robert-Burns.html

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2457326.0.Poetry_power_Bob_Dylan_names_Burns_as_inspiration.php

--Mais oui! (talk) 11:11, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Dead external links to Allmusic website – January 2011

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--CactusBot (talk) 18:14, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Is this a song or a verse?

A "song" surely normally means a set of words + music, or at least more traditionally words + melody. But it's completely unclear what the tune of this song is, or even if there is one. (The mechanical music recording presented has a melody barely distinguishable from a plink-plonk accompaniment, and no apparent connection with the words.) I have found a number of versions on the web, but not yet any two with the same tune. Am I missing something? Is there in fact anything normally meant by "the tune of A Red Red Rose"??

(I'm not sure of the current situation for musical samples, but it seems to me highly incomplete to attempt to write about a tune without ever writing down the tune you are talking about.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Imaginatorium (talk • contribs) 16:28, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

This is exactly why I started editing this article, because of the unclarity about the text at issue. It is a song redacted by Burns based upon hearing it "in the country". He intended it to be sung to a particular tune, which apparently differed from the original one he heard. The provenance is awfully murky, but it was eventually paired with a traditional tune called "Low Down in the Broom". That is the version that is widely beloved today.

I have done a great deal of work to clarify the various settings of Burns' verse, and I hope the article is much clearer now. There is still some tidying up to do. Trumpetrep (talk) 21:33, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Cosmology

Remarkably, the song appears to anticipate the ultimate fate of the Earth (according to modern astronomers) as the sun becomes a red giant in a few billion years. It seems impossible that there would be any awareness of this in the 18th century and yet the language about the seas going dry and rocks melting with the sun is remarkably specific. I have found mention of this elsewhere on the web (see http://weareallinthegutter.wordpress.com/2010/01/ for example) but so far no expert commentary. Mark Taylor (talk) 01:16, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Along these lines, there was a section about the geological implications of Burns' lyric. Since it was just one guy's interpretation with no other sources, I removed it:

== Symbolism ==

The song is highly evocative, including lines describing rocks melting with the sun, and the seas running dry. Burns may have been inspired by the concept of deep time put forward a few years earlier by geologist James Hutton in his Theory of the Earth in 1789.

Hutton and Burns were contemporaries, and would have mixed in similar circles in Edinburgh.

References

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Maple Leaf Forever

I removed the passage linking the song to "Maple Leaf Forever" because the cited link does not contain any information about Burns:

The tune of A Red, Red Rose was used in the creation of the Canadian patriotic song The Maple Leaf Forever.

References