How does Robert Burns use imagery in A Red, Red Rose?

The poem's imagery looks after the matter of the beauty of appearances. But what catches the reader by surprise is that the beloved, in being compared to a "melodie / That's sweetly play'd in tune," is established not only as the subject of the lyric but as the lyric itself. To say that his "luve is like a melodie" is to association the beloved with the poem itself and its very lyricism.