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For me, "The Last Rose of Summer" is the quintessential Chloe song. It's my favourite track on her first album, and while I prefer it as a solo -- since it is thematically about oneness, aloneness -- I very much enjoy hearing Chloe perform it as a duet, as she did in the group's concert in Japan.
But what is the poem about? What actually happens in it?
Is it just a comment on old age and the loss of friends as they pass away?
Or is it something more?
Well, let's have a look.
The first verse is familiar enough:
'Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
To give sigh for sigh.
The most obvious themes of the poem are spelled out from the onset: the flower is the last survivor of the summer season, and lingers on, still blooming, after the other flowers -- personified as its "companions" -- have withered.
But what happens in the second verse?
First of all, we discover that the poem does not have an omniscient, third-person narrative voice, but a first-person narrator who is physically involved in the rose's world.
He addresses the rose:
I'll not leave thee, thou lone one!
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go, sleep thou with them.
Note the emotions with which he invests the flower: "lone"-ness and "pining."
But what's this? He will not "leave" the flower on the stem? He's telling it to "sleep" with its dead companions?
If he won't leave the flower on the stem, in its current lonely state, what, then, will he do?
How will the flower be put to "sleep"?
The rest of the verse provides the answer:
Thus kindly I scatter,
Thy leaves o'er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.
Gasp. He plucks the last rose of summer.
This rose has not been left to die of old age.
The speaker has, in a sense, euthanized it.
Note the use of the word "kindly," though. The speaker considers his act of killing the last rose to be an act of kindness. To him, this is a mercy killing. He considered the flower's lonely condition so painful, so unfortunate, so intolerable, that the "kinder" act, in his eyes, was to put an end to its life.
So now we come to the third vese. We have the poet in the garden contemplating the remains of the last rose of summer -- which has died by his hand. And what does he say to himself?
So soon may I follow . . .
(Make note of that. He contemplates following the last rose.)
So soon may I follow,
When friendships decay,
From Love's shining circle
The gems drop away.
When true hearts lie withered
And fond ones are flown,
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?
The poet establishes a set of conditions -- conditions that the rose's previous situation symbolized: an end of friendship, love, and companionship, resulting in a bleak, lonely world.
And under those conditions, he asks "who would inhabit / This bleak world"?
Implicit is the answer is, "Not I." And the word "would" indicates the availablity of choice on the speaker's part -- the choice whether to live or to die.
Indeed, given the conditions that he has set out, the speaker muses, "So soon may I follow" the rose . . . into death.
But here's the rub. To follow the rose is not to follow it into a natural death, because it did not die of natural causes. It died at the hand of the poet. Therefore, for the poet to follow the rose means that he will die . . . by his own hand.
The poem is a contemplation of suicide.
Lest anyone be surprised by this, note that the poem is a product of its time. The author, Thomas Moore, was a close friend of English Romantics like Lord Byron, and suicide -- or the contemplation of suicide -- was a recurrent theme in Romanticism. In 1770, the pre-Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton took his own life at the tender age of 17, prompting many Romantics to enshrine him as the archetypal genius who dies because his talents aren't appreciated by a shallow world. Goethe's poignant novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) tells the story of a sensitive young soul who takes his own life after his heart is broken. And the image of Hamlet, with his "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy, was ever present in Romantic minds (Coleridge famously saying, "I have a smack of Hamlet myself"). Manfred, the literary masterpiece of Moore's friend Byron, includes a famous suicide-contemplation scene atop the Jungfrau.
Therefore, for Moore to write a poem such as this, a veiled contemplation of suicide, was for him to express a recurrent sentiment of his time, to explore a theme that was very topical among Romantic artists.
It's a rich literary work -- possibly the richest text of any Celtic Woman song -- and beautiful in its sweet melancholy (a melancholy that is perhaps a shade darker than some readers may initially realize).
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