How have the Poets you have studied explored different aspects of Love?
How have the Poets you have studied explored different aspects of Love?
Before I answer the question, I need to look at what love is. Love can be defined in many ways. The Oxford English dictionary defines love as: 'an intense feeling of deep affection' or 'a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone'. However love means something different to different people.
To some people love can mean simply taking someone to bed, and for some people love can be seen in the smallest of things; such as a look or a touch. However for most people love is a deep and profound people that most people will only experience once in a lifetime. The word love is used all the time but the number of times it is actually meant is very rare. Love cannot be defined for each individual person as love is an extremely personal emotion. Love must come from the heart and 'Ballad', 'To His Coy Mistress and 'Porphyria's Lover' present love in very different ways.
Love can mean various things but in 'To His Coy Mistress' love is shown to be simply the desire to sleep with someone as quickly as you can. The poem is more about lust than love and the story of the poem shows a man trying to convince a woman to sleep with him.
The central theme of the poem is time and the idea that time is running out for the narrator and the woman he is trying to sleep with.
'Had we but world enough, and time',
'To walk and pass our long love's day.'
The narrator uses caesuras, which makes the reader pause, to create the idea of time lasting forever. This is because at the beginning of the poem Andrew Marvell (poet) is trying to say to the woman that he would wait forever. This is because he's trying to build up the idea of courtly love and true and eternal love and romance. So that he can contrast it later on it the poem and this makes the second part of the argument stronger. And the alliteration 'long love's' also draws the reader's attention to this part of the poem and shows that it is important. The start of the poem is important as he sets up the first part of his syllogistic argument. This could also show that Marvell thinks that time plays a big part in love. However, he then goes into saying that time is running out and that they should have sex now. It could be that he believes that love grows over time or he could be trying to say that love cannot wait and most love will not stand the test of time. That links to 'Ballad' where love is seen as something that is controlled strongly by sexual desire; comparable, in a way, to lust.
The form used in the poem is rhyming couplets AA BB CC DD and there are no separate stanzas; it is just one long, continuous verse.
'An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze'
The form of the poem may be a metaphor for how the poet feels about love. The idea that love is continuous, unfaltering and undying, but also repetitive and constant and safe. In short, he is showing that love is whatever you want it to be.
The tone of the poem is a persuasive ...
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The form used in the poem is rhyming couplets AA BB CC DD and there are no separate stanzas; it is just one long, continuous verse.
'An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze'
The form of the poem may be a metaphor for how the poet feels about love. The idea that love is continuous, unfaltering and undying, but also repetitive and constant and safe. In short, he is showing that love is whatever you want it to be.
The tone of the poem is a persuasive tone. The narrator builds up his argument that the women should sleep with him, all the time adding hints about the little time they have left.
'But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near'
The narrator uses the persuasive tone as another hint that they should hurry up as their time is running out. The idea of 'time's winged chariot' is a reference to Helios, the Greek God that would ride across the sky in his fiery chariot chasing away the stars. Marvell perhaps chose this to show that like the stars the time for the narrator and the woman is running out.
'To His Coy Mistress' shows similarities to another poem, 'Ballad'. This poem is about a maid who was 'raped' by a shepherd. It shows similarities to 'To His Coy Mistress' in the way that in both of the poems the writers reflect on the idea of lust. The difference between the two is that in 'To His Coy Mistress' the narrator is trying to get the woman to sleep with him by using different arguments. Whereas in 'Ballad', the narrator is a woman remembering her experience of sleeping with a Shepherd. The main difference between the two poems of course being that in 'To His Coy Mistress' the narrator is still trying to get the woman to sleep with him, whereas in 'Ballad' the woman has already slept with him.
The central idea in 'Ballad' is that the narrator (a woman) wishes that she had never slept with the Shepherd and wants her virginity back.
'I wish I was a maid again:
A maid again I cannot be'
The poem starts with the woman sleeping with the Shepherd; the Shepherd leaves her and the woman now wishes that she had never slept with him. The poem shows the effect that this ordeal had on the woman and the language used reflects on her different stages of what could be portrayed as madness, ending with her killing her child and herself. Her virginity is seen as something very precious and she even goes as far as to say that he has her heart. The use of imagery in the form of a metaphor shows that this particular area of the poem is very important and the poet could be trying to show that he believes that virginity is just as important as love, and therefore the heart, itself.
The tone of the poem is one of regret and remorse showing the woman's regret for sleeping with the Shepherd.
'I wish my sorrows all away,
My soul with God, my body clay.'
The quote shows that the woman regrets what she has done so much that she wishes she was dead. The language used throughout the whole poem shows that she is wishing that she could change what she has done. The use of the supernatural brings a new perspective to the poem and shows that perhaps the poet was a spiritual man the believed in fate and spiritual love. However, just the idea of the poem, the fact that the woman was essentially raped and that love was not involved perhaps shows that the poet is confused about what love means.
The form of the poem is in the traditional form of a ballad, the stanzas are each four lines long and consists of a quatrain in the form ABAB.
When my apron would hang low
Me he sought through frost and snow.
When it puckered up with shame
And I sought him, he never came
The form of the poem is very formal and structured. It is the layout that we recognise a poem by, this shows that it is not a very complex poem, perhaps a possible link to the ideas in the poem, the idea that she slept with the Shepherd and wants her virginity back, that there is nothing more to it than that and there is no deeper meaning. The caesura in the fourth line shows that this part of the poem is important. This is significant because as the poem is a ballad it has been passed on by word of mouth and has been told as a story. The use of a caesura would let the storyteller know that this part of the poem is important and he would put emphasis on that line by pausing where the caesura is.
'Porphyria's Lover' is different to the other two poems in the sense that it is about love and not lust. However it does have some similarities to 'Ballad' as it talks about death.
The central theme to 'Porphyria's Lover' is that the narrator and Porphyria fall in love with each other the narrator then kills Porphyria so that their love for each other will never fade.
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
The word Porphyria is the name for a disease. It is a disease where porphyrins can build up in certain areas of the body. It is actually the theory that Dracula is based on as if it builds up in the teeth it can make them have a reddish tinge, not unlike the teeth of Dracula. Also it can make the sufferer sensitive to light. In this poem the disease is probably meant to be affecting the brain, and it makes the narrator go crazy and kill the woman. The title 'Porphyria's Lover' gives us an idea as to what the narrator is suffering from and perhaps shows us what drove the narrator to kill the woman. The woman is named Porphyria; this could be to give the impression that the narrator is completely controlled by the disease. The language used throughout the poem shows that the narrator thinks that he is safe with the disease as the woman, Porphyria, makes him feel safe and warm. The poet is perhaps trying to make the disease represent love and how it can keep you safe and make you made.
The tone of the poem is sinister. It also makes you think that the poem is building up to something big happening at the end of the poem.
'Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl'
The language used shows gothic connotations. The sinister tone is building up to the end of the poem where the narrator kills Porphyria. The language, especially the word 'rose', sounds slightly supernatural and it shows that the love they share is supernatural and sacred. This idea is strengthened further at the end of the poem, when the narrator says 'And yet God has not said a word!' this shows that maybe God will not condemn the man as his love to Porphyria was blessed and sacred. The poet could be trying to say that love itself is sacred and blessed.
The form of the poem is in the form of a limerick i.e. ABABB. As well as this the poem is not split into stanzas, it is kept in one big stanza, like 'To His Coy Mistress'.
'The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
and did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break'
The form of the poem could be seen as showing the narrators continuous association with Porphyria's disease and how eventually it gets the better of him and he kills someone. It could also be seen to represent the poets ideas on love i.e. that it is continuous, unfaltering and constant.
To conclude, I believe that all the different poets have different ideas about love. From Robert Browning that possibly thinks that love is special, spiritual and can control us. To Andrew Marvell and the author of 'Ballad' who think that love is not as much spiritual as physical. This links back to what I said at the start of the poem that love is different for every person. To quote a friend 'Love is whatever you want it to be.'
Ross Keys 10A Love Poetry Coursework 18/06/2007
