Comparing Better Than Meeting And The 1967 Song Somebody To Love

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The 13th century poem 'Better than Meeting' and the 1967 song 'Somebody to Love' by Jefferson Airplane could both be construed to be about praising monogamy and loyalty as the best way to go about relationships. Both works were made at a time where it was common to see one person with multiple lovers, what with religious polygamy in medieval India and the free love of late 60's hippie-strung San Francisco, but it could be argued that these works strike against that culture through various arguments. For instance, in 'Somebody to Love' has lines such as "When the garden flowers, baby, are dead, yes and your mind, your mind, is so full of red". I believe the garden flowers in this verse are in reference to the grove of potential love interests someone thinks they have. If they try to focus on all of them they would have to strain their energy to cultivate all of them instead of growing just one flower that could blossom into a beautiful thing; the garden would die if the love is spread thin, but focusing on one allows you to at least enjoy its beauty. A similar thing is said by Mahadeviyakka in 'Better than Meeting', where she says "Better than meeting and mating all the time is the pleasure of mating once", implying that if one goes all around town …show more content…

This is shown by the verse "Your eyes, I say your eyes may look like his, yeah, but in your head I'm afraid you don't know where it is". The person wanting to take the singer off her feet may look as pretty as her own lover, inside they're probably just some horny bastard trying to get their rocks off, but in the end the singer keeps her loyalty to her lover. This expresses loyalty to her lover, while Mahadeviyakka expresses loyalty to her lover in the 2nd stanza: “When he's away I cannot wait to get a glimpse of

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