Exploring Love and Loss

Authors Avatar

Word Count: 1526                  Poetry Essay on Love and Loss             Amrit Morokar 11k

Amrit Morokar 11k

Guiding Question: How can we compare and explore the themes of love and loss within 4 poems of our choice?

     This essay will be based upon the four poems “First Love” by John Clare, “Remember” by Christina Rossetti, “When We Two Parted” by Lord Byron and “A Woman to Her Lover” by Christina Walsh. The themes of love and loss will be explored and compared in this essay, and we will be shown how the authors use of language, structure, and form in each poem, can be shown to portray their ideas, regarding love and loss. 

      “First Love”, “Remember” and “When We Two Parted” have a fixed rhyme – (ABAB rhyme). However, “A Woman to Her Lover” has free verse structure (no iambic pentameter) which was used to develop the idea of freedom because the poem is about “real love” and freedom. It is the only poem of the four that doesn’t stick to any rhythm, maybe this is because the author wanted to capture the reader’s attention? A good example of this is when Christina Walsh says “O husband, I am yours forever and our co-equal love will make the stars to laugh with joy.” This is one way that Christina shows freedom in her poetry. “Remember” has a patriarchal sonnet, which is where the first eight lines discuss a particular idea of loss, and the last six lines offer a resolution/conclusion of that idea. “When We Two Parted” has a blank verse and uses an iambic pentameter. An example of an iambic pentameter in “When We Two Parted” is “Half broken-hearted, to sever for years.” This shows ten syllables, and with every other being stressed, it creates intensity and a certain amount of seriousness.

Join now!

     In these two poems, “First Love” and “A Woman to Her Lover”, the authors try their best to represent the nature of love. In reading “First Love”, john Clare gives out a clear message to the readers: How it feels when we fall in love for the first time. He expresses falling in love as something magical. He describes how his legs “refused to walk away”, in other words meaning he was totally wrapped up in love and so mesmerized by her beauty that he did not actually want to walk away. “A Woman to Her Lover” is ...

This is a preview of the whole essay