Symbol Analysis
What lies beneath, Shmoopers? It's more than a spooky flick. It's a philosophy question. What might exist beyond the limits of our vision or understanding? That's the kind of question that's keeping our speaker up at night. Luckily for us, he's decided to put it to all his readers so that we can all sprain our brains trying to push beyond the limits of our imaginations.
- Lines 1-2: The speaker personifies the rose in this stanza, and it's not just because he likes the idea of a flower wearing a dress. Instead, he's driving at the authenticity of our understanding of the world. Is there more to what we know than what we can see? Now there's a question that will keep you up at night.
- Lines 3-4: The roots are hidden, according to our speaker, and the trees are the ones to blame. But why would trees want to hog the spotlight? Isn't that how everything is, though? Don't we all just focus on the effects (trees in this case) and overlook the causes (the roots)? Shouldn't we also celebrate the reasons that things happen, as well as the things themselves?
- Lines 5-6: Regrets—we've had a few. Believe us when we tell you, then, that regret is an invisible thing. More than that, according to our speaker it's apparently hard to hear. In this case, we might imagine that we could hear someone expressing their feelings of regret, but even still those expressions aren't easy to make out. That's why our speaker demands to know who's going to tune in and pick them up. Again, we have a question that's aimed at getting us to look harder, and listen more intently, to a world we might ordinarily miss.