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    Poem about love often offers a path for the poet to express one’ feeling. in Robert Burns’ “A Red, Red Rose” and Hebert Kretzmer ’s “On my own”. They both express the theme of love but they can be compare and contrast in terms of content, length, structure and their method to express their feelings.

    Though the themes of the two poems are the same, they have a totally different content. ”A Red, Red Rose” is a romantic story that a man promises his lady he will be back again even “it ware ten thousand mile”. It express a love of romantic and the whole tone of the poem is full of believe and hope. Unlike “A Red, Red Rose”, “On My Own” is a completely doleful poem. It expresses the speaker’s unrequited love to a man and she can only imagine he is with her. As the poem says “I love him...But only on may own...” The tone of this poem is sad and frustrated.

    The two poems have many differences between them in terms of structure. “A Red, Red Rose” has only four stanzas, each stanza is a quatrain and there is a pattern of rhyme. The whole poem appears in a regular style. Different from “A Red, Red Rose”, “On My Own” has twice more stanza than “A Red, Red Rose” but it doesn’t have a regular pattern to follow. Their different structures show the unlike properties of them. “A Red, Red Rose” is a declaration of love. It is quite formal so it expresses the speaker’s thoughts in a regular way. In an irregular form, “Own my own” seems to be an internal monologue of a soliloquist. It freely expresses the feelings, emotions and images in the speaker’s mind and need not to care about how others respond. Both their structures affect the tone of the poem.

    Although the length of “On My Own” is much longer than “A Red, Red Rose”, it created a better world for readers to understand. “A Red, Red Rose” uses a lot of similes and metaphor to show the love between the speaker and the lady. For example, it uses “the sands of life” (or an hourglass) to represent their love will not fade out with the running of time. It included a large amount of popular poetic images, just as “Till a’ the seas gang dry” and “rocks melt wi’ the sun”. More than “A Red, Red Rose”, “On My Own” not only included similes, but also a lot of imaginations. When the speaker express her own feelings, she imagine the man she loves “is beside me”, she can “feel his arms around me”. These imaginations are more powerful to let the readers enter the emotional world of the speaker and taste her sadness in a love which is unrequited.
    Apart from the differences mentioned above, the two poems show a good attitude to love. They both treated love seriously. The last stanza of “A Red, Red Rose” is a farewell and promises of return. The last stanzas of “On My Own” also ended with the repetitions of the sentence “I love him...” They both think love is valuable and they would like the sacrifice for love.

    To conclude, “A Red, Red Rose” and “On My Own” are poems expressing feelings of love. They have totally different contents, structures and methods to express their feelings, “On My Own” created a better world by imagination to let the readers understand the view of the speaker. However, both of them have a serious attitude to love.