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Attitudes Towards Love in Poetry
Love is an emotion that has been felt by people throughout time. It is
extremely difficult to put any strong emotion into words, but through
the pre-twentieth century ‘Love and Loss’ poetry we are able to see
various different attitudes shown towards love and the way that love
is conveyed through relationships. The poems referred to in this essay
are “First Love” by John Clare, “How Do I Love Thee” by Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, “A Birthday” by Christina Rossetti, “A Woman to Her
Lover” by Cristina Walsh and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning.
By studying the love and loss poetry, the poets lives and the cultures
they lived in, it is easy to see why people have different perceptions
of love. The poem “First Love” by John Clare reflects his attitudes
towards love. It is a complex poem describing the physical and
emotional affects of falling in love for the first time. In this poem,
the narrator has experienced love at first sight and has feeling for
nobody else. He says that
“… my blood rushed to my face
And took my sight away.”
This quotation describes one of the physical effects love brings; it
shows that the poet is so fixated in one woman that he is blinded by
everything else. It mirrors the cliché ‘blinded by love’. This shows
that Clare feels that love can be for only one person at a time, as he
is concentrating on nobody else. The way Clare uses language shows
that he finds first love an uncomfortable feeling. This is shown in
the rhetorical questions he uses.
“Are flowers the winter’s choice?”
These are two images that have been unusually linked, flowers and
winter. This is not a comfortable image. Flowers usually die in winter
and this creates dea...
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be stronger after death, this shows an open attitude: that love is
never ending and there is no loss of love from death. The final poem
is “A Birthday”, which I believe is describing the love that Christina
Rossetti has for God. She uses language to portray beautiful imagery
to try and express how she is feeling. This is a celebration of her
love and her attitude is that love brings a person only joy.
All the pre-twentieth poets lived different lives in different
cultures and so there attitudes would have formed in different ways.
However like most others they have all felt love in some way or
experienced the jealousy and pain it can bring. Their love and loss
poetry shows love in different forms, neither more true than the other
but all just showing the different attitudes that people of different
cultures have learnt or felt is true about love.
“Love Poem With Toast” by Miller Williams introduces the effect our desires have in our daily lives in order to “move, as we call it, forward” (11). Miller Williams also conveys this message accompanied with a darker meaning; though these desires make up a large part of our lives, in the end none of it will matter because we leave the world the same way we enter it, with nothing. Despite this message being carried out, it is still a love poem at the surface, but it is not about a person confessing their love, rather pretending to love, and continuing to live with this self-conflict about choosing to be in a frigid relationship over not being in one at all. It is interesting how Miller rhythmically categorizes his message throughout the poem;
Attitudes Towards Love in Pre-1900 and 1990's Poetry “The Despairing Lover” written by William Walsh was written pre 1900 whilst the second poem “I Wouldn’t Thank you for a Valentine” by Liz Lockhead was written in the 1990’s. These poems are almost a century apart. Attitude towards love changes over time and these poems represent this. I Wouldn’t Thank you for a Valentine is about how people think about Valentine’s Day in the 1990’s, while The Despairing Lover is showing what people think and how important they see love in the 1990’s.
In the essay I hope to explain why I picked each poem and to suggest
The three sources I have selected are all based on females. They are all of change and transformation. Two of my selections, "The Friday Everything Changed" by Anne Hart, and "Women and World War II " By Dr. Sharon, are about women’s rites of passage. The third choice, "The sun is Burning Gases (Loss of a Good Friend)" by Cathleen McFarland is about a girl growing up.
The Range of Feelings Associated with Love in Catullus and Lesbia' Poems Of Catullus’s poems, the Lesbia poems are the most memorable, particularly as they contain such a wide range of feelings and emotions. Whilst we do not know what order the poems were written in, it is tempting to arrange them in a progression from constant love, to confusion and despair and finally hatred. Poem 87 appears to be at the beginning of the relationship between Catullus and Lesbia. The symmetry of the couplets beginning “nulla” and ending with “mea est” emphasizes the idea that no one loves Lesbia as much as Catullus. The placement of “nulla” at the beginning of the
Both, the poem “Reluctance” by Robert Frost and “Time Does Not Bring Relief” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, revolved around the theme of lost love. Each poet used a similar array of poetic devices to express this theme. Visual imagery was one of the illustrative poetic devices used in the compositions. Another poetic device incorporated by both poets in order to convey the mood of the poems was personification. And by the same token, metaphors were also used to help express the gist of both poems. Ergo, similar poetic devices were used in both poems to communicate the theme of grieving the loss of a loved one.
As the tone changes the perspective of the reader changes as well. There is no clear way to determine whether the speaker is responding to her situation with the appropriate amount of madness or is actually going mad and escaping into her own mind. Plath’s poem shows how a woman 's happiness was defined by her relationship to a man, which is enough to infuriate or drive any woman insane. The speaker struggles to continue her very existence because of her lost love. It is true that the speaker is very emotional and feels things very deeply, but that is not enough to prove that she had lost her mind. By the end of the poem the speaker seems to realize that she is wasting her time waiting on a man. She would rather have a present love that is completely unfathomable than a real love that is not around. The repetition in this poem makes the reader believe this loss is actually causing the speaker to lose her mind, but through changing tones that mirror the emotions anyone would go through in a situation of loss like this the speaker’s response is completely
“And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility” (Coleridge). Pride effects everyone and everything. It effects the way that we live, the way that we read and the way that we go about things. It hinders people and events. T.S. Eliot seems to have some experience with this word in context. In his two poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Journey of the Magi”, there seems to be strong senses of pride and regret of an unfulfilled life. They each make a tour through points in their lives, which seem to have been hard times. Pride puts a bad outlook on life, just like it says in the quote by Coleridge. It is a big problem that drapes over the heads of human kind and seems to be a big thing in the eyes of the speakers in the poems. It is a hard thing to get past and it hurts you very easily. If you live your life in fear, it may end before you can do what you wanted to do with your life. If Eliot’s poems are doing anything, they are telling people to get past their insecurities and go for it. Eliot could be using himself as an example as someone whom hung up his insecurities and succeeded. Pride is shown a lot in these poems, and it shows why someone should get past it.
The artist states about her significant other that “he's the only one that I have ever loved” which challenges the myth that the perfect partner in a relationship would never separate via anything or anyone. In another instance, the artist’s partner seems to have been cheating and the words spoken during that night where she caught him, thus emphasizing that cheating could happen in any relationship, no matter how perfect it may seem. Another myth dispelled is that no matter how good and faithful the person is, the other person would change from brute to princelike. The artist describes how she knows the other person regrets his mistake, and he still leaves her with another woman, and even states how she “adored him” and hopes he knows it, but ultimately “[makes her] sick” whilst calling him love. In addition, the artist dispels another myth about how the people in a relationship only needs love and it does not matter if the people have different values.
unlucky and ended up with a husband who did not love the lady but just
from the rest in that they describe a love that has ended or will end
Love is one of the main sources that move the world, and poetry is not an exception, this shows completely the feelings of someone. In “Litany” written by Billy Collins, “Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims, “Song” by John Donne, “Love” by Matthew Dickman and “Last Night” by Sharon Olds navigate around the same theme. Nevertheless, they differ in formats and figurative language that would be compared. For this reason, the rhetoric figures used in the poems will conduct us to understand the insights thought of the authors and the arguments they want to support.
As a whole both poets emphasise the fact that desire stems from the eye being deceived by external beauty, and once an individual acts upon this certain destructive emotion then they are prone to committing many other
“Love Poem” is a twenty-four-line poem in six stanzas. The generic tittle is an accurate description of the poem; it is a clue that this may not be a traditional example of love poetry. Both poems have the same rhyme scheme because the second and fourth line of every stanza rhyme. However, “Magic of Love’ speaks of a general love bringing happiness, joy and comfort. While “Love Poem” is much more personal. The speaker talks of memories with his clumsy love. Both poems have a different point of view when it comes to love. In Ferrier’s poem, she describes love as something perfect, that fixes everything. However, in Frederick’s poem, he doesn’t speak about what the love does right but rather he talks
How does the poet 's love for the young man differ from his love for the Dark Lady?