How death has an impact on different types of love

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How death has an impact on different types of love

The three poems ‘Plena Timoris’, ‘Remember’ and ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ all explore different types of love. ‘Plena Timoris’ explores the dependency that love evokes and how unrequited love can lead to severe consequences – death. ‘Remember’ is a sonnet about the eventuality of separation and remembrance of time spent together. ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ is about maternal love faced with the brutality of untimely death. It describes the strength of maternal love and contrastingly from the other two poems, shows how unlike romance, maternal love is more ethereal and death merely a physical separation. Although to a lesser degree than ‘Plena Timoris’, ‘Remember’ questions the sustainability of love after physicality is lost. Just as expressions of death differ so do the reactions of people towards death in each of the pieces. An array of emotions, from betrayal to resignation to quiet acceptance of the inevitable, is portrayed. All of the poems demonstrate the effects of death through a range of literary devices specific and parallels made with the intensity and durability of love.

‘Remember’ aims to be instructive in that the protagonist instructs her lover to react in a specific manner to her death.  It begins with a dying wish: “Remember me when I am gone”. The first line itself insinuates the concept of reluctant separation, as it seems like a lovingly sad plea. The metaphor “silent land” appears to mean a place of death, a cemetery where silence dominates and the dead rest in their graves, buried underground, in perpetuity.  However, the next line stating “when you can no more hold me by the hand” suggests they can no longer be together physically, but would like him to remember her and cherish the good memories, as opposed to denouncing her because she left him. Line 4 further exemplifies that the speaker may not actually be dying as she says “I half turn to go yet turning to stay”. She is torn between the idea of staying with her lover and being actually satisfied with perfect love.

The reactions in the two other poems are expressed differently. Unlike the conceptual idea of death as explored in ‘Remember’, ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ and ‘Plena Timoris’ tackle death in a more inevitable manner, leaving no other way for its speaker than to face it and be affected by it.

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In ‘Refugee Mother and Child’, Achebe, creates a sense unfairness in the situation that the key characters find themselves in. A young mother is faced with the impending death of her child due to circumstances beyond her control. Yet she is brave enough to celebrate her child’s life by spending time and loving care on him. Strong emotions are aroused in the reader by the last line when Achebe describes her routine by saying “like putting flowers on a tiny grave”. A grave is meant to be a resting place for one who has grown old in the world ...

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