Hey look, it's my English 205 essay, for lack of a better place to save it.

“My love is like a red, red rose” by Robert Burns is a classic love poem that makes use of one of the most often used symbols for love, the rose. Burns’ poem describes a new romance by using numerous similes in his text. This poem was written as a lyric poem and the repetition of certain lines and sounds in the poem makes it ideally suited to be sung with music. The travesty is a reflection of my view that the rose is a read metaphor for love that has become overused and meaningless. I transferred the style of the poem to a new context, an obsessive man mourning the loss of his “love.”
In writing the travesty I kept the structure of the poem the exact same, as the rhymes and repetitions in the original are significant to the establishment of the mood of joy and excitement. The poems basic structure consists of four four-line stanzas alternating between iambic (four feet) and iambic trimeter. However at times Burns diverged from his structure adding an extra syllable in lines 10, 12 and 14. I copied this as well. By following this structure my parody creates the same sense of musicality and joyful flow as the original. The joyful sound is subverted by the imagery of the dead woman rotting in her grave, creating a tension between rhythm and content that cannot be resolved by the reader.
Another structural similarity is my imitation of sound. I decided to open each line with the same word used by Burns in order to make the poems look similar. I also copied internal sounds in many lines. For example, line 5 of each poem in which I exchange the word “pale” for “fair” and “boney” for “bonnie,” creating the same sound with a different meaning.
A significant portion of Burns poem is committed to the use of similes to establish the narrator’s feelings for his “love.” I kept the use of simile intact in the first two stanzas, but after these I moved to a use of literal language. This is done in order to establish the insanity of the narrator in my parody. Also in the last stanza there is a subtle indication of necrophilia which utterly perverts the intentions of Burns original poem. However the intense feelings of his narrator are translated easily into the obsessive nature of my narrator.
In my travesty the simile of the rose becomes utterly ridiculous and totally inappropriate to the content of the actual poem. The structure, rhythm and meter is copied exactly in order to create tension and to mock the imagery of the original poem. By using a metaphor that is entirely inappropriate to the content of my poem, it creates a travesty of both the original poem and the metaphor.