“Seemed midnight at noonday.”
This man’s love has turned his world upside down, and he appears confused. It has affected his mind and body and this is conveyed in the words
“My legs refused to walk away”.
From studying Clare’s background it is known that he fell in love at an early age but had to part from this woman. However he never forgot her, even when married in later life. This is shown in the last two lines of “First Love”:
“My heart has left its dwelling place
And can return no more.”
Clare portrays the attitude here that love brings pain, especially when lovers are forced to part. The person in love here has experienced such a strong emotion that he cannot return to how he previously felt. It is a sad image, that the heart has experienced love and will never be able to forget it.
The attitudes shown in this poem are extremely different to the other pre-twentieth century poems and show that John Clare must have led a different life, or had different experience of love, to gain these views.
The poems “How Do I Love Thee” and “A Birthday” are much more joyous and express the tremendous happiness love can bring. Unlike “First Love” neither of these poems show love to bring any pain.
The poem “A Birthday” by Christina Rossetti shows the joy that love can bring to someone. The poet has used natural imagery which creates beautiful images through words. In the first few lines she uses similes to compare how her heart feels to nature. The adjectives she uses let the reader know how fulfilled she is. For example the person in love feels:
“like a rainbow shell … in a halcyon sea;”
This is an image of perfection. It shows that her heart could not get any more joyous. In line 10 Rossetti explains that she feel this way because she has found her love.
Christina Rossetti lived during the pre-Raphaelite movement. She was extremely faithful to her protestant beliefs, so much so that she broke off her engagement to painter James Collinson, who was a Catholic. I believe that her devout love for God is shown in her poem. It describes her celebration for love of God. This poem shows the richness of her love by the way she uses colours and textures to describe the materials and the beautiful decorations. From “A Birthday” the impression is given that this love is being returned. There is no sorrow as is usually felt when love is unrequited. This poem is about a celebration of her love. The decorations Rossetti describes show that the person feeling love wants to decorate as much as possible. This shows a feeling of generosity and the way that she wants the celebration to be as exquisite as her love.
The repetition of
“my love is come to me”
shows that she wants people to know she is in love. This is the definite reason for her happiness. This poem shows the attitude that love has no pain but is fulfilling and overwhelming and this is very similar to the feeling shown in the poem “How Do I Love Thee?”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “How Do I Love Thee?” tries to put the feelings of love into words. The love felt in this poem is real and fulfilling. Like in “A Birthday” there is no loss in this poem; the writer seems content with love. The poem explores almost how far love can reach, the capacity someone has for love. Barrett Browning answers the question How Do I Love Thee? by giving dimensions
“I Love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, …”
She uses soft verbs such as ‘purely’ and ‘freely’ to express love.
The love Elizabeth Barrett Browning feels in this poem is all encompassing. Her love is everything about her, as it says
“I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, and tears of all my life! …”
The love in this poem is fulfilling and seems to be a true love for only one person I assume. It is the sort of love that is felt between family members or friends. This lover is asking for nothing in return but just generously giving love. It appears that Barrett Browning believes there to be no loss to love, as though she will carry on loving forever and this is shown by the last line of the poem
“-and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”
Usually the main loss in love is having to depart from one another at some point. However Barrett Browning has a very positive attitude to love and life, she doesn’t believe that death creates a loss of love, rather that love becomes stronger after death. This poem describes a real love for someone than is being given and asking for nothing in return.
The poem “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning is quite the opposite of “A Birthday” and “How Do I Love Thee?” It shows a selfish and possessive love. It is more a love for his possessions than the feeling of true love for a single person. The poem is set as a dramatic monologue with the duke’s attitudes to his last duchess emerging throughout. The duke starts by describing a picture of his last duchess as a ‘wonder’ and offers his guest to look at her. This shows that he is pleased by the painting and wishes to show it off. He seems proud of his departed wife. The duke starts to describe how the duchess treated him. He says
“was not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek”
This statement starts to make the duke sound jealous as he is complaining that he alone did not make the duchess happy.
He soon starts describing the duchess’s faults, which is not seen as an act of love. He is jealous of the way the duchess acts around other men. He says
“-as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift.”
She only gives him as much attention as she gives everyone else and this frustrates him. The duke feels that their love should mean that he has his wife exclusively to himself. The poem gives an impression that the duke thinks of his duchess more as a possession that he owns than as a wife with whom he can share love. The duke does not fall in love with women but negotiates for his brides. His attitude is more that he wants a wife than that he loves his duchess.
The duke obviously feels that he should be in charge of the relationship as when he feels jealous of other men he says
”I gave commands;
then all smiles stopped together”.
The duke was in a more powerful position and with other men around he must have felt vulnerable.
The poem gives the impression that the last Duchess is just another possession that the Duke owns. Toward the end of the poem it says
“Notice Neptune, though,”
The duke seems just as pleased by this object as he is by the painting of his wife. It is thought that the duke poisoned his duchess, as it says
”Then all smiles stopped together.”
This gives the impression that the duchess has been killed by the duke. If this is true it shows that the duke would rather have his wife dead so that she can talk to no other man than alive and have to share her smiles. He obviously had no real love for her but rather just wanted somebody to call his own.
Christina Walsh was writing in the late half of the 19th Century. She wrote “A Woman to Her Lover”, a poem that shows the way she feels true love should be. The attitudes she shows towards love in this poem are very ahead of her time and have only become more recognised during the later half of the 20th century. She has a very fair, mature way of looking at a relationship and I feel that her attitudes towards love show that she wants to be treated equally, be respected by men and feel love that is true. However her writing remained unpublished as did many other women’s writing of the time.
In the first three stanzas of “A Woman to Her Lover” Walsh describes what she feels a relationship should not be based upon. She says
“No servant will I be”
This shows her more modern attitude to relationships. She does not want to do all her mans chores, nor does she want to be worshiped as she explains in the second stanza. In the third stanza she makes it clear that she does not want to be used purely for men’s sexual pleasure. She says
“Not for you the hand of any wakened woman of our time.”
She is explaining to her lover that no modern woman will marry you if all you want her for is sexual pleasure. She shows that women have a choice in who they love. This is a more modern attitude; women no longer must marry men that they don’t want. They have the choice to refuse a man; this is shown by the repetition of
“I refuse you!”
She uses a punctuation mark to make this comment more powerful. In the last stanza, Walsh explains what she wants from a lover. Her attitude to love is that it should be equal, they should be a ‘comrade, friend and mate,’ and be equal in the relationship, loving each other equally, sharing life, work, sorrow, joy and passion. The word ‘co-equal’ sums up her attitude to love completely. She shows from this poem that she knows that women should have much more choice in whom they marry and marriage should be based upon two people loving each other for the correct reasons.
The way Walsh lays down factors that she wants and does not want in this relationship show that she is a being very practical in her attitude towards a relationship. She is realising how the love will be true and in which circumstances it will not. Finally she says that if they have a co-equal love they shall experience a joy such that they shall reach what she calls the heart of God.
All these poems relate to a different attitude towards love. Some show it to be joyous and other poems such as “My Last Duchess” show the pain that love can bring. In fact this poem shows that jealousy is such a powerful emotion that it can sometimes overcome love and ruin a relationship. “First Love” could also be described as showing love to be uncomfortable; however it is also shows pleasant emotions associated with love. Throughout this poem Clare describes the intense mainly physical but also emotional feelings that are felt when falling in love for the first time. This poem gets the reader to understand that his heart has been changed by his first love and shall never return to how it once was. “A Woman to Her Lover” shows an attitude much further ahead of the writer’s time, she conveys ideas that sexism is wrong, that women are neither servants in the home, goddesses to be worshiped nor are women purely for men’s pleasure and that no sensible woman would want this. It shows that woman of the time could have a choice of lovers and this woman wants love to be ‘co-equal’ so that they can be partners in life. This is the best relationship and the love is true and fair, it is a very practical way of looking at a relationship. “How Do I Love Thee?” and “A Birthday” are extremely full of joyful love. “How Do I Love Thee?” describes how much she loves someone and it shows love to be totally selfless as she is asking for nothing in return. The writer explains that her love will 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.
