La rosa como motivo literario en Ángela María Dávila y Manuel Ramos Otero

Abstract

This article explores how these two Puerto Rican poets appropriate the famous trope of the rose in their respective poems "¿Será la rosa?" and "La rosa". A comparative analysis reveals the literariness of the rose as an enclosed space containing a polarity of forces that conjugate in life and death, though both poets treat this space differently. In "¿Será la rosa?" the rhetorical interrogation becomes an inquiry about the most important floral symbol of the Western world as a possible locus of a certain order capable of imposing itself over the chaos of existence. In "La rosa" we are in front of a rose-sore that reveals an aestheticization of the suffering of the lyrical subject who's dying as a result of AIDS related complications. Both poems show a possible conceptual debt with Sor Juana's sonnet "A una rosa".