Compare and contrast the different ways in which the theme of love is presented and portrayed in pre-1914 poetry.

Introduction

Love has been a popular theme for poetry for many centuries, love poems come in many different forms and contexts for instance they could come in the form of a song or ballad or a stanza or sonnet in which they use rhyming in the form of rhyming couplets and similes and repetition. There were many different types of love portrayed in the poems we read for example possessive love, true love, jealous love, greed can also be a type of love. We have studied poems in the form of ballads, sonnets and stanza’s.

Stage Two

In this essay I am going to discuss poems by the name of First love, My last duchess, His Coy Mistress and The flea I will look at these poems in the order they were stated.

Stage Three

In the poem First Love the content is about a first love that was so strong that it didn’t just have emotional effect but also had physical effects, the type of love portrayed is quoted in the title it is first love and is very strong, the language/style used conveys the virtual state he is in. The ...

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Stage Two

In this essay I am going to discuss poems by the name of First love, My last duchess, His Coy Mistress and The flea I will look at these poems in the order they were stated.

Stage Three

In the poem First Love the content is about a first love that was so strong that it didn’t just have emotional effect but also had physical effects, the type of love portrayed is quoted in the title it is first love and is very strong, the language/style used conveys the virtual state he is in. The poetic structure is in a rhyming couplet form.

In the second poem my last duchess the content is about a king or a similar authority and about his last wife who he had painted for him and put it with the pictures of his other wives or duchesses. The type of love portrayed is greed a man who always wants more, the language/style of this poem is a single stanza poem. The poetic structure of this poem is just in short lines and in one long paragraph like a song.

In the third poem To His Coy Mistress the content is about the seduction of a woman using argument to try and win her over. The type of love portrayed is what I would describe as common love as I can’t think of a better way to describe it. The language used is like old style language with words like ‘Thou’ and ‘Shouldst’. The poetic structure uses a double entendre it is also a hyperbole.

And finally in the last poem The Flea the content is a love poem about their love being like a flea that has sucked the blood of both of them and mixed it and it is like they are related and love each other so much. The type of love portrayed is dependant love where they cant live without each other. The language used is religious imagery and also old style language it uses words like ‘suck’d’ and ‘know’st’, the poetic structure is metaphors and similes.

Stage Four

These poems are all the same in the way they’re all poems and they’re all about love but all in a very different way for instance they’re all about different types of love. For example ‘First Love’ is about very strong first impressions of love and ‘My Last Duchess’ is about a man who has had many wives and this is just another wife that he has had a picture painted of her and had it hung on the wall. And in ‘His Coy Mistress it is about a man trying to seduce a woman by arguing with her and trying to win her over, and in the flea the love is more physical than emotional in the way that he is trying to persuade her to have sex with him.