jects her because he has awakened to the fact that she is not worthy of his love.
The Romantic style places great weight on language and imagery grounded in nature (the rose, the nightingale) and in the wildness and strangeness of the natural world. The rose is on a plant which blooms only once every five years, and the nightingale is a wild bird whose beautiful singing bespeaks of a world of wonder and mystery beyond the constraints of human reason and technology. Clearly, at the same time, the story is meant to show a close connection between nature and human states of mind and spirit, including both the pure and the corrupt sides of those states. Those who are exposed to the beauty of the rose and the nightingale are deeply moved to a rich emotional state, but the people of the court feel cheated when they find that the rose and the bird are "real," in other words--natural, and not man-made.
Andersen's style in the story is deceptively simple, so that a child as well as an adult might read it and take it for its surface meaning, but there are deeper meanings beneath the Romantic symbols. The symbols of the bird, rose, and the magic items the prince creates out of his imagination are powerful though simple, because they are so striking and call to mind so many associations, for both adult and child, for both simple-minded
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