The Theme of Relationships and Love in Poetry The themes of relationships and love have always, and will always be a major factor of all of our lives. Poems such as First love and Love grows old too explore the thoughts and feelings of different relationships. Poets use love and relationships in many different ways: husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, mother/father and son/daughter, etc. Poets use this effective yet straightforward device to appeal to every audience possible. Within the poems First Love and Love Grows Old Too the relationships explored prove to be very diverse. First love is about the endless eternal love between a mother and daughter, whilst Love grows old too is about a forgotten relationship rusting like a bike in the rain. In First love the perspective of the young girl looking up at her mother is very different, "You were tall and beautiful …. Your neck stood clear and full As the stem of a vase" Mary Dorcey uses this powerful and effective simile to emphasize the mother's natural grace and strength. Additionally, by comparing her neck to a vase, the poet invited us to view her face as a flower, giving her beauty a fuller bloom. Mary Dorcey also uses many other techniques to convey her feelings. Onomatopoeia appeals to the sense of sound. To describe the leaves, Mary Dorcey uses the word 'cracked', by using this onomatopoeic word the poet is appealing more to our senses, giving us a fuller picture. The poet's use of alliteration "black boughs" slows the pace of the poem down. By doing this she is making the poem more pronounced. By using enjambment Mary Dorcey allows her thoughts t... ... middle of paper ... ...s old too uses several poetic devices to help us imagine the settings and emotions within the relationship. It is a very striking and influential poem, these devices are effective in the way that it makes the reader relate to their childhood and the relationships within their family at the present day. To conclude, the themes of love and relationships are given in many voices in the poems we have covered. We have seen how different people view the relationships they are in. For example Love grows old too has a much different relationship to First love, this is because Love grows old too has an elderly couple whose relationship has long been deteriorating and is ultimately ruined, where as First love is about a relationship which has a passionate and obsessive sense which creates a warm and calm effect for the reader.
The poet shows us that her mother did her best, and also was able to
“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
Since the days of the early Greeks, florigraphy - the language of flowers - has been used to convey "a wide range of human emotions, conditions, events, or ideas" (Seattle n. p.). From the "strength in character" of the gladiolus to the "delicate beauty" of the hibiscus, flowers are symbolic in the message and the image they produce (Tansy n. p.). Tennyson uses florigraphy to symbolize man’s desire to create the perfect Garden of Eden and to expose the contrary emotions the protagonist feels towards Maud. She is "associated with both lily and rose, as both a chaste subject and a sexual object" (Johnson 111). Traditionally, the lily symbolizes "coquetry and purity" and the rose symbolizes passion (Tansy n p.). Maud is the "shrinking reticence" of the lily when the protagonist is content with their relationship and the "aggressive...
" The same refrain is used to end the poem, making a complete circle. This creates, for the reader, a sense of loneliness about the poem as a whole. In the second stanza, Eleanor is introduced as a woman who cannot face the world as her self. She wears the “face” that she keeps in a jar by the door. Literally this can be interpreted as makeup, but symbolically she is hiding herself.
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.
This poem helps us to recognize and appreciate beauty through its dream sequence and symbolism. The poem opens with the Dreamer describing this
The theme throughout the poetry collection is the emotion of melancholy and the speaker speaking with a wise and philosophical tone. She has also used the repetition of nature and religion-based implications in her poems. Most of the poem titles is named after a specific plant because it fits in the meaning of her entire poem collection. The title of the poems hold symbolism because of the flower language. You can constantly see the cycle of rebirth through the beautiful description of a nonphysical form of a soul and develop into beautiful flowers in her garden. The vivid imagery of the flowers by describing the color and the personification of these living beings. She is also trying to explore the relationship between humans and their god. The poet is a gardener who tends to the flower and she prefer the flowers in her garden over her god, “knowing nothing of the
of the difficulty in acceptance. In the first few stanzas the poet creates the impression that she
Dealing With the Issue of Separation in Poetry Introduction In recent weeks in English we studied 3 poems of varying origin and of various types of poetry. We studied Havisham, by Carol Ann Duffy, Stop all the clocks by W.H. Auden and Valediction: Forbidden mourning by John Donne. All of which are about the loss of loved ones, but in a different way. In 'Havisham', the bride (Miss Havisham) was left at the altar by her to-be-husband; she has sat in her dressing room in her wedding dress for year after year since that day.
To what extent does the presence of nature impact the poems in “twenty love poems and a song of despair”
The force of her fit drowns out the beauty seen in springtime flowers. Furthermore, in order to personify Melancholy, she is referred to as, “thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, /And feed deep, deep, deep upon her peerless eyes” (Keats 932). The depiction of this mistress is another personification, but this time it is of Death as a Goddess. These confusing lines of the poem could refer to Melancholy or Death in this stanza as either goes from an untouchable Goddess to a Goddess with a human nature that includes anger and pain. A distinct opposition to Melancholy or Death’s choler is the soft hand that the speaker is asking someone to restrain.
With time poems may have lost their voice, but not their importance. Up to this day, poetry is still one of the greatest forms of artistic expression; Poems speak to emotions and capture feelings. There is no right format of a poem, but yet a world of possibilities. Instead being unchangeable poems are innately open to interpretation; they should be spoken out loud in order to be “heard”, convey truth and cause impact. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot is an extremely meaningful poem; it is one of Elliot’s best-known works and without a doubt a masterpiece (Hillis). T.S. Eliot introduces the poem with a quote from Dante's Inferno (XXVII.61-66), and with that sparks our curiosity. He then makes statements and questions that perhaps everyone has done, or will do at some point in life (Li-Cheng, pp. 10-17). The poem is a legitimate work of the modernist movement, the language used is contemporary; the verses are free and the rhythm flows naturally.
The Theme of Love in the Poems First Love, To His Coy Mistress, Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess and Shall I Compare Thee?