Love is an important literary tradition, in that it, it has been written about by poets down the ages. Choose at least three love poems you have studied and comment on the different ways in which, the subject has been dealt with.
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Introduction
English Pre -1900 Poetry Coursework Love is an important literary tradition, in that it, it has been written about by poets down the ages. Choose at least three love poems you have studied and comment on the different ways in which, the subject has been dealt with. Out of the poems I have studied, I have decided to choose "His Coy Mistress" written by Andrew Marvell, "My Last Duchess" written by Robert Browning and finally "The Flea" written by John Donne. In my essay I will explain what is going on in the poem, what relevance it has to the poet etc. The way the poem is structured and how it is written. Finally I will compare the poems and link them using similar things involved with love etc. Then I will write a final conclusion to the comparisons. The first poem that I am going to discuss is " To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell. This is a poem of seduction; the man is trying to persuade his mistress to have sex with him. He starts off by saying how he would treat her if he had all the time in the world. ...read more.
Middle
He then continues this theory by saying the flea is a "temple" of their marriage. We then understand that the woman's parents don't approve of the man marrying their daughter. He still goes on about his theory of killing the flea; we begin to think that the woman is getting annoyed with him being so supposedly stupid. We suspect she is going to kill the flea to end this annoying and silly episode. He now starts pleading with her not to kill the flea. He starts off jokingly saying he could kill him by killing the flea and then goes on to say that not only will she be killing the flea and himself but her as well. He says this as if she is really going to kill herself, he also demands that it would be sacrilege to kill this flea for it would kill all three, the flea, him and her. The woman now at the start of the third stanza has actually killed the flea. The man begs the question why have you killed innocent living things meaning the flea, himself and her. He then accuses her of being cruel. He criticises her by saying she is weaker than he is by killing the flea. ...read more.
Conclusion
The woman pays the ultimate price for this and is executed. This poem was written more than two centuries later than the other two poems. It also has a rhyme scheme that suits the duke's arrogance because the poem is presented in one big block, with assertive full stops and dominance unlike the other two poems in which the poem is split up into a few stanzas. In "My Last Duchess" the poem is written as one big verse. But similar to the other two poems it contains rhyming couplets. In conclusion all the poems deal with the situation of a man wanting to have sex with a woman, in all the poems we think the man was more for lust than true love. Some poems describe how society was in the time the poem was written. This is especially so in "My Last Duchess." Since these poems were written there is now a better attitude to women than there was a long time ago as depicted in these poems. Women now have greater rights than they used to and when they are married they are not owned by their husband. They have the free right to do what they want. Finally, I think that all these three poems show clearly how much man's attitude to woman has changed over the past centuries. They are no longer married because of money etc. but for love. ...read more.
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