Cherry-ripe

Analysis

This poems tells us about a beautiful girl who has matured but is not ready to make commitments. In the first stanza, the author compares her face to the beauty of a garden with blooming flowers. Then he goes on to compare her face to a heavenly paradise,

one with so many “pleasant fruits” ripe for the picking and eating, which reiterated the girl’s beauty. The cherries, the author says that they cannot be bought elsewhere, meaning they are really one-of-a-kind or precious.

In the next stanza, he says that the lips enclose a double row of orient pearls, which are her teeth. When she laughs, her mouth (lips and teeth) looks like rosebuds (red lips) filled with snow (white teeth). No prince or friends of the girl can buy her/ her mouth. However, the last line is again a line of sadness, perhaps because the guy failed from his offer of love.

In last stanza, it is a reiteration of the girl’s tenacity since the girl does not want to accept suitors. Her eyes always guard against suitors who want to have her lips. She uses her eyebrows to express disapproval, especially when she frowns as if she would kill her suitor/s. All who attempt to look at or touch her lips are actually the one’s who cry (out of frustration and sorrow) since they cannot have and touch the ripe cherry lips of Celia. Through the repetition of the last line of each stanza, “Till “Cherry-ripe’ themselves do cry”, it implies that whatever the situation will be or how persistent men can be, she stays with her justification and continues rejecting courtship.

Also, this tells us that women has the capacity to control her own actions and decide at their own free will not mentioning on how easily they could turn down men. Moreover, it gives us the knowledge on how reserved women might have acted during the author’s time, of which could be compared to some of our women in our time.