You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.

Thomas Moore (1779–1852), the Irish poet and songwriter, published this couplet in his long narrative poem *Lalla Rookh* (1817), a hugely popular Romantic-era work framed as a series of tales told to an Indian princess. The lines occur in “Paradise and the Peri,” one of the poem’s best-known sections, where Moore frequently uses sensuous images—perfume, flowers, vessels, and ruins—to express how feelings and memories outlast physical forms. In the early 19th century, such imagery fit Romantic preoccupations with transience, loss, and the persistence of emotional or moral “essence” after outward destruction.

The image contrasts material fragility with the endurance of what is intangible. A vase can be smashed, but the fragrance that once filled it lingers—suggesting that love, beauty, virtue, or memory can survive the ruin of the body, a relationship, or a cherished object. Moore’s couplet also implies that attempts to erase the past are incomplete: traces remain in atmosphere and recollection. In Romantic terms, the “scent” stands for the soul or emotional residue that outlasts the forms that once contained it, turning a simple domestic metaphor into a reflection on permanence amid decay.