Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” reshapes a Scots folk song into a vow that grows past all reason — love measured against drying seas, melting rocks, and the whole run of a life. In four short quatrains it moves from a single image (a rose newly sprung in June) to an oath against the end of the world, and closes not on grand impossibility but on a simple, human promise: to come again, though it were ten thousand mile.