Read the poem “sea rose,” by h. d. rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf, more precious than a wet rose single on a stem? — you are caught in the drift. stunted, with small leaf, you are flung on the sand, you are lifted in the crisp sand that drives in the wind. can the spice-rose drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf? in the final stanza, the poet uses words such as “spice” and “acrid” to appeal to the reader’s sense of smell. sense of touch. sense of sight. sense of taste.

In this poem by H.D. Rose, the poet uses words such as "spice" and "acrid" to appeal to the reader's sense of smell. This poem is about roses, about two types of specific roses "the sea rose" and "the spice rose." The poet makes a contrast between them. In this particular excerpt, he wants to affirm that the scent of the sea rose is better than the traditional rose that makes the sea rose unique.

The author here is talking about "fragrance" and the acrid fragrance is different than other fragrances so, in other words, this leads us to smell. It's not the sense of taste as we don't find words related to something you can eat and taste as spice here is a type of rose and acrid is a kind of smell, the same goes to the sense of touch and the sense of sight because this whole phrase talks about how a delightful smell could be turned into something hardened in a leaf.

The correct answer is sense of sight.

Indeed, Imagist poetry is quite a trap for the reader with its false simplicity. It uses imagery to convey hidden meaning that usually is quite different from the literal meaning of the words it uses. If forces the reader to think carefully about the situation it describes and visualize it in order to “observe” carefully the mental image and decipher its symbolic meaning, its allusions.

Even though the words here may apply to both smell or taste, those meanings are literal and it is the image of such things that counts. When the reader is able to comprehend the symbolic meaning behind the literal semantics, he/she experiences an instance of synesthesia (the transformation of a sensory stimulus into another type of sensory stimulus).

It is important to also know a thing or two about the author. H.D. was a bisexual American poetess and a staunch Feminist. She writes about women, gender and the place of women in Western, modern society. Here, the rose is obviously a metaphor for a woman and then undertones of its description are both social and sexual.

The rose is “harsh and marred” like a woman who is punished because of her non-conformity with traditional gender roles and sexuality. The rose is unique, just like this woman and it is lonely and isolated or “meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf” yet “precious” because of its singularity. However, her position is fluctuating between two contrastive elements, the land and the sea, it is in the “drift”, the only constant is change. The woman is between the traditional social role of a mother and an artist or a worker and her sexuality is also in-between heterosexuality and homosexuality. However, society denies her the right to her own agency, and the author uses the passive voice to signify that the rose/woman is not in control of her choices (both societal and sexual). Thus, she is “flung on the sand, lifted in the crisp”.

 Her last question is how the rose can survive in when it is lonely and “hardened in a leaf”. The words spice and acrid convey such ambiguity since spices can be bitter or sweet and acrid is the combination of bitter and sweet as well. However, smell is not the point here; the point is the position of a feminist, non-gender conforming bisexual artist in traditional Western society. It might be crude but necessary to point out that roses have throughout the history of art been used as a symbol of the female reproductive organ, which again questions the role of women in society as only a “mother” who gives birth with that genitalia and of bisexual women who are attracted by it.

they are direct opposites. they can both be corrupted. they are inseparable.