White Rose of York White Rose of York The White Rose of York (also called the "Rose alba" or rose argent), a white heraldic rose, is the symbol of the House of York and has since been adopted as a symbol of Yorkshire as a whole. The origins of the emblem are said to go back to the fourteenth century, to Edmund of Langley, the first Duke of York and the founder of the House of York as a cadet branch of the then ruling House of Plantagenet (although other reports suggest the rose and Yorkshire have links going back further than that.) The
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