The key question here is, “Why is this poem difficult?” A classroom discussion quickly defines this. For example, the language isn’t difficult. The poem has a simple vocabulary. It has a simple childish structure. In recognising this, we are already making valid analytical statements. The difficulty, of course, is in what the poem is actually about. Is Rose a girl, ill, or perhaps sexually corrupt in her bed of “crimson joy”? Or is she actually a flower in a flowerbed? In an insecure classroom, where difficulty is a personal failure, pupils will be anxious to get this right. It must be one or the other, but I fear I’m too stupid to know which. In a secure classroom, where personal response is habitually valued, pupils will readily admit that they aren’t sure, or that they are vacillating between one reading and the other. We don’t know What she is and this takes us straight to the heart of the poem’s energy, because, when we see Rose as both a flower and a girl, the one image superimposed on the other, we realise that the poem tells us about the transience of human beauty. A young girl’s beauty is as short-lived as a flower’s. Our discussion of difficulty has taken us straight to the heart of the poem. The secure, validating classroom has worked and the anxious one has failed.