"In the end it is the haunting sadness of regret and loss which is the pervading emotion that remains with us when we read love poetry."

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Poems of Love and Loss

  “In the end it is the haunting sadness of regret and loss which is the pervading emotion that remains with us when we read love poetry.”

  We get a feel for many emotions from the poems of love and loss that we have studied. On the one-hand, there are poems such as ‘First Love’ and ‘A Birthday’, which give us a sense of happiness, joy, excitement and awe. They leave you warm and glowing inside. On the other hand, there are the feelings of regret and loss that we gain from poems such as ‘When you are old’, ‘Cynara’ and ‘The Voice’. This essay shall look at the language, structure and the ‘pervading emotion’ that remains with us once we have read the poems, and in particular ‘loss and regret’.

  When reading the poems ‘First Love’ and ‘A Birthday’, we are moved by the symbols and the way that they are used to build up a picture in your head. Much of the metaphors are very fruity and naturist. For example, in ‘First love’ John Clare describes the woman’s face as ‘a sweet flower’ and again in ‘A Birthday’ the imagery is packed in line after line:

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‘My heart is like an apple tree’…

‘My heart is like a rainbow shell.’                                  

These similes are critical to ‘First Love’. However, when compared with the other poems and their similes and metaphors it does not dominate our opinion of the love poems. For example, the way in which Ernest Dowson talks of the feast ‘Cynara’ it is far more effective and memorable than that of the imagery of ‘A Birthday’, ‘I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, /But when ...

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