This poem is the inspiration for Summerâs name and the source of the quote on her gravestone. It is quite an old poem, and looking through the actual text (see the Wikipedia article)âŠ
The poem itself is, as the title says, about the last rose left now that summerâs gone and winter is coming.
Itâs also about grief and loneliness and mortality â the first verse describes the last roseâs own bereavement and isolation, the second is a promise by the narrator to be with the rose in her grief and to mourn her when her own time comes, and the third and final verse is the narrator predicting their own impending death.
But right now, Iâm focused less on interpreting the poem in general and more what its use could mean for RWBY â and straight away, thereâs something that occurs to me.
'Tis the last rose of summer, / Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions / Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred, / No rose-bud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes / Or give sigh for sigh!
This first verse could be describing Summer. We know very little about her, after all. But much more likely is that itâs describing not Summer herself, but her last Rose â Ruby.
Particularly the Ruby weâre presented with in the Red Trailer, who is wandering through the wintery wilderness alone after visiting a gravestone. Summerâs gravestone. Ruby is alone and grieving. Since the Red Trailer was made very early on, with very little nailed down, and thatâs where the use of this poem is introduced, it would be fair to stop here⊠but the ideas and images in the Red Trailer were built upon and developed into the RWBY we all know and love, and its possible the poem did play a role there as well.
Looking more at the Ruby we see in the show, while itâs easy to assume that she actually doesnât fit the poem after all, Ruby is lonely. She has her own loneliness, just as Weiss and Yang and Blake have theirs. She has to deal with people seeing her as the last remaining part of Summer, sheâs quite possibly the last Rose and the last Silver-Eyed Warrior to keep both their life and their Silver Eyes⊠it wouldnât be too loose a fit.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the next verse complicates this.
I'll not leave thee, thou lone one. / To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping, / Go, sleep thou with them;
Thus kindly I scatter / Thy leaves o'er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden / Lie scentless and dead.
So, knowing the context for the âthus kindly I scatterâ line completely changes what I think about that one. Until now, I thought it was from the perspective of the one being scattered, but now this is the one doing the scattering â like a mourner scattering the ashes â or in this case leaves - of the deceased. If we make Summer herself the subject of the poem, that suggests the narrator is someone mourning Summer â possibly Ruby. If we make Ruby the subject, as I suggested last paragraph, then⊠whoâs scattering Rubyâs leaves?
And this is the point where I choose to shed all pretense at formality and confess that I read the line âIâll not leave thee, thou lone oneâ, considered what that would mean if the lone one was Ruby, and immediately thought of Weiss as the narrator. I am now imagining Weiss, hopefully many decades post-canon, as the last surviving member of Team RWBY, at Rubyâs funeral.
And with that tangent over, on to the third and final verse:
So soon may I follow, / When friendships decay,
And 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?
Okay, first of all. Hi Atlas Arc (Iâve talked before about how I think that one of the things the Atlas Arc as a whole, and Volume 7 in particular, was about was âfriendships decay[ing]â, while âgems drop awayâ could be applied to Ruby and Team RWBY as a whole falling in the Volume 8 finale).
Second of all, having read it in full, I actually think this is another case in RWBY of multiple interpretations applying simultaneously. Ruby is the subject â the last rose of summer, alone, grieving, away from Yang (flower of her kindred), scattering rose petals like leaves â and the narrator â the one mourning Summer Rose
Third of all. This is an incredibly bleak and pessimistic poem, and given RWBYâs tone and themes, I canât help but wonder if it is, in some capacity, a response to this poem. The poem ends with asking âwho would inhabit this bleak world alone?â, to which RWBY responds that we keep moving forward.
