This song was originally written by
John Cale, former
Velvet Underground bassist (and rock-influenced
avant-garde composer in his own right).
Like many other Bauhaus pieces, `Rosegarden' deals with the ultimate banality of loveless sex (which is perhaps a large part of the reason they chose this piece of Cale's). In this respect, one can see the heavy influence of Eliot's The Waste Land. `Rosegarden' can be tied in other ways to the works of Eliot. For example, from Eliot's `Ash-Wednesday':
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
. . .
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
And from `
Burnt Norton':
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Here, and in `
The Hollow Men', we see the rose as a symbol for
God. Only in God (who in His
infinite glory is both
Rose and
Garden) can `
all loves end'. This includes, of course, not just romantic love, but also the loveless love of
sex. Thus `
Virgin Mary' (modern
Christian society, in its
decline) views the `
whores' (actually us, modern Western culture in general, in particular the
unsaved) as producing a
mindless `
scream of chatter'; this is the philosophical posturing in defense of the `
enlightened' values of the
sexual revolution. This posturing is, to Virgin Mary,
senseless because it ignores the
Truth of God.
The Rosegarden, from which Virgin Mary hears the whores, is the afterlife, or at least a state of grace. Thus it is a `funeral', and one is nearer to the Rose that is God (note also the connection this makes between Paracelsus's secret name of the rose and the cabalistic search for the true name of God). The `sores', as could be expected, are the stigmata of Christ (see also Bauhaus's `Stigmata Martyr'). Only through these sores and the suffering of Christ can we, as Virgin Mary has done, transcend the meaningless sexuality of this world.
Even in Grace, one can still see and experience those who have been left behind to revel in their orgiastic stupor. Thus Virgin Mary is tired of, and even irritated by, their relentless ``gossip and complaints''. What she does not realise is that it is her job as one of the saved to lead the whores towards the Truth. And this is what Cale and Bauhaus are attempting, if only unconsciously, to do with this work.