There are many things we can perhaps more easily say with flowers than with words. And flowers can say many things to us. So perhaps these poetic expressions of spoken words and flowery subject are a perfect match.

Many would agree that there is one flower, the rose, that embodies both the human condition, its ambitions, its sacrifices and its symbolism of devoted love that together with its own peerless self; the beauty of its perfume, its hues and colours, its shapes and forms, from rambler and climber to the stately grace of a rose bed, and, of course, its thorns, to warn that consequences carry a price.

Poets know that a rose is perhaps able to speak in many tongues on many subjects and it is therefore unsurprising that the rose is one of the great enduring symbols of the tradition in both Western and Eastern poetry.

A rose can bring a tremble of the lip, or raise the beating of a heart. They can create a mood or simplify a feeling. Their message can be direct or nuanced but so often it is just perfect.

Our classic poets from Hafiz, D H Lawrence, Robert Burns and Shakespeare, along with very many others, explore this beautiful living symbol with their exquisite lines and verse.

1 - Fifty Shades of Roses - An Introduction

2 - The Year of the Rose by Algernon Charles Swinburne

3 - A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

4 - Rosa Rosarum by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson

5 - Venus in the Garden by James Weldon Johnson

6 - A White Rose by John Boyle O'Reilly

7 - Rosa Mundi by Arthur Symons

8 - Rose of All the World by D H Lawrence

9 - To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick

10 - Go Lovely Rose by Edmund Waller

11 - To Roses in the Bosom of Castara by William Habington

12 - Gloire de Dijon by D H Lawrence

13 - Sonnet 130 - My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun by William Shakespeare

14 - Sonnet 109 - O! Never Say That I Was False of Heart by William Shakespeare

15 - My Rose by Hildegarde Hawthorn

16 - A Ballad of Dreamland by Algernon Charles Swinburne

17 - Roses of a Dream by Damon Runyon

18 - Sonnet 54 - O! How Much More Doth Beauty Beauteous Seem by William Shakespeare

19 - Sonnet 99 - The Forward Violet Thus Did I Chide by William Shakespeare

20 - In an Eastern Rosegarden by Pirani Ameena Begum

21 - Early Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke

22 - No Rose That in a Garden Ever Grew by Edna St Vincent Millay

23 - The Secret Rose by W B Yeats

24 - The Rose by John Cournos

25 - Where Roses Would Not Dare to Go by Emily Dickinson

26 - Amid the Roses by Alice Dunbar Nelson

27 - How Did the Rose by Hafiz

28 - A Flower Given to My Daughter by James Joyce

29 - To a Friend Who Sent Me Roses by John Keats

30 - The Sweets of the Rose by Hafiz

31 - A Rose by Sir Richard Fanshawe

32 - The Rose Has Flushed Red by Hafiz

33 - London Roses by Willa Silbert Cather

34 - Laughing Rose by William Henry Davies

35 - A Wild Rose by Alfred Austin

36 - June by Francis Ledwidge

37 - Tis the Last Rose of Summer by Thomas Moore

38 - Virtue by George Herbert

39 - Summer in England, 1914 by Alice Meynell

40 - The Rose Has Left the Garden by Richard Le Gallienne

41 - Summer is Ended by Christina Rossetti

42 - Written in September, 1804 by Christian Milne

43 - Love in Autumn by Sara Teasdale

44 - September by George Arnold

45 - An October Garden by Christina Georgina Rossetti

46 - Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire by James Russell Lowell