Literary Essay - The Nightingale and the Rose

Literary Essay
The Nightingale and the Rose

The Nightingale and the Rose is a short story written by Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde was a famous author and poet. The Nightingale and the Rose was not a book nor a poem, but a short story that he wrote during his lifetime. Like in each short stories, there is a theme, in this one, the theme of the story is love and sacrifice. There are two ways that love is portrayed in this story, the first one is true love and the second one is a crush. When Oscar Wilde wrote this story, he wanted to reflect the cruelty of the world by showing the two faces of love.

The story begins when a young student is crying because the daughter of the professor told him that if he would bring her red roses, she would dance with him at the ball, but there is no red roses in his garden anymore. When a nightingale heard the student say that, it felt bad for the student and told itself that the student is a true lover, that he knew the true meaning of love. The nightingale decides to go search for a red rose for him, it went and ask all of the Rose-trees if they had any red roses but no success, they did not have any, but the last tree told it that there is a way to get a red rose, but it did not want to tell the nightingale because it was too awful, but the nightingale insisted so the tree told it. The nightingale had to sacrifice it’s life to build the rose. This is where the theme of sacrifice begins. The nightingale decides to sacrifice itself for the student, because it thinks that death is a just a little price to pay for love, that it is nothing important. It show that a life would be willing to sacrifice itself to make another one happy. By giving it’s life for the birth of the rose, we can see that the red rose is the reincarnation of the nightingale, because the rose was born from the blood of the nightingale.

In the beginning of the story, we think that the student felt true love for the professor’s daughter, but by the end of the climax, we discover that he was never really in love with this girl but just had a crush on her. We know that when we discover that when the girl denies the red rose from the student, he throws the rose that he was searching for so long into the street, where it fell into the gutter, and a cart-wheel went over it. The student did not even try to convince the girl to go with him to the ball, he just surrenders like that. He also said that love is not half as useful as logic. If he was really in love with the girl he would not surrender so easily like that. The life of the nightingale was just wasted like that. The nightingale sacrifice itself out of love, true love, but that love was demolished, ruined, destroyed. The professor’s daughter also don’t know what is the true meaning of love, because she is a materialist, she just like people who buy her jewels, that is why she did not accepted the rose.

In conclusion, The Nightingale and the Rose is a touching short story that shows the differences between true love and a crush, and what a life is willing to do to make another one happy, in this story, it is sacrifice.