Love And Love: The Presentation Of Love

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The presentation of love and its difficulties can be very different as is seen in Romeo and Juliet and the poems by Carol Ann Duffy.
Carol Ann Duffy uses lots of different words to talk about love. The poem Valentine is a monologue and in the poem she says “I give you an onion” I think that she says this because love is like an onion and has many layers that you have to unpeel until you reach the centre. However, I think there is a more evil side and that she chose to use an onion, because when you cut into an onion you start to cry. In the Poem “Havisham” she writes about her “beloved sweetheart bastard” which is an oxymoron and I think it means that she loves him but hates him at the same time.
The poem Ann Hathaway has lots of metaphors and lots of Shakespeare’s poems about love are also written in this way. The poem ends with Anne claiming that all her memories are stored “in the casket of my widow’s head” meaning she has great memories of her dead husband.
In the poem Mrs Lazarus it talks about how love can be so powerful it has driven her mad. After her fiancé died she talks about how she has “wept for a night and day”, “crawled at the burial stones till my hands bled, retched his name over and over again, dead, dead”. I think this may mean that when her fiancée died she was so heartbroken that it has driven her mad.
However in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet love is presented in different ways. The types of love shown in Romeo and Juliet are courtly love, family love and true love. Each character has a different view on love and some of the characters view on love change during the book.
Shakespeare’s first mentions love in the first act when Romeo is talking about his love for Rosaline with Benvolio. Romeo uses oxy...

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... it could be to make his writing appeal to more people.
In conclusion I think that Carol Ann Duffy’s language in her poems is not the sort that you would expect in find in poems about love. Some of the words she uses are not normally associated with love like “possessive”, “knife” and “lethal”. These are not good words to use in love poems. I think that she uses these words to try and make sure she gets across what she thinks love can actually be like.
The words Shakespeare uses in Romeo and Juliet are more romantic. During the whole play, there are reminders of how much in love Romeo and Juliet are with each other. But because Carol Ann Duffy views are different to the way we traditionally see love it can be harder to understand what she means. I think that love in Romeo and Juliet is easier to relate to than the way love is presented in Carol Ann Duffy’s poems

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