roses have thorns. The words are from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 32: Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud, Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. All men make faults. Another great poet died from a rose’s thorn. It is said that the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) died of leu- kemia which developed from the prick of a rose thorn. No rose without a thorn is an old English proverb. See the last rose of summer. |