“O my Luve is like a red, red rose / That's newly sprung in June;”
— Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose (1794)
Context
Robert Burns composed 'A Red, Red Rose' in 1794, reworking fragments of older Scots folk song to a traditional air; it first appeared in Pietro Urbani's Selection of Scots Songs and remains one of the language's best-loved love lyrics. The doubled adjective opens the poem's governing simile, likening the speaker's beloved to a rose just come into June bloom, before the later stanzas pledge a love enduring 'till a' the seas gang dry.'
How the repetition works
Where the catalogue's other doubled adjectives darken toward loss - Dickens's valedictory 'far, far better,' Milton's blind 'dark, dark, dark' - Burns's 'red, red' is epizeuxis in a major key, deepening a colour rather than a sorrow. The repetition saturates the rose past ordinary red toward an almost unnatural vividness, so the simile's tenor, the beloved, inherits that heightened intensity before the comparison is even complete. It is also the catalogue's first line drawn from folk song rather than the printed page: the doubling is a singer's device, a sustained beat held on the adjective that a melody would linger over, showing epizeuxis at work in the oral tradition that page-poetry grew out of.