The Rose of Rouen would northern lords over-run the south, but more, that "they would then live in it and take what they needed including wives and daughters." This is the fate, says the poem, that Edward of York saved England from. Like other political poetry of the period, it is careful to identify its protagonists by their cognizances rather than naming them: Edward, of course, is a white rose, his father Richard of York, Duke of York, is a falcon and fetterlock, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick a ragged staff, his uncle William Neville, Lord Fauconberg a fish hook, and John Mowbray, Duke
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years." ("Four in America"). She herself said to an audience at Oxford University that the statement referred to the fact that when the Romantics used the word "rose", it had a direct relationship to an actual rose. For later periods in literature this would no longer be true. The eras following romanticism, notably the modern era, use the word rose to refer to the actual rose, yet they also imply, through the use of the word, the archetypical elements of the romantic era. The following lines