Romantic love, physical love, unrequited love, obsessive love… Compare the ways poets have written about love, bringing out different aspects of the theme.

Authors Avatar

Love and Loss                                            GCSE                         Chris Thompson 11P

Love and Loss

Romantic love, physical love, unrequited love, obsessive love…

Compare the ways poets have written about love, bringing out different aspects of the theme.

Poets have written about love in many, possibly countless ways, each of them emphasising different aspects of an emotion which is at once both wide and deep. The romantic poets, who were part of a movement, beginning in the late eighteenth century, reacting against the conventions of classicism, saw the emotions and the senses as being more important than the reason and intellect that had been typical attributes of classicism and used their poetry as a means of expressing the power of the human imagination. I have studied many love and loss poems including, “First Love” by John Clare, “When We Two Parted” by Lord Byron and “A Woman To Her Lover” by Christina Walsh.

In “First Love” by John Clare, we see two main types of love, obsessive love and physical love. We can see physical love as the poet talks about and describes his lovers face. “Her face it bloomed like a sweet fire”, this shows how the poet sees the girl. The poet later says “I never saw a face so sweet”. The word “sweet” is repeated a few times in this poem, by which the idea of “sweet” is made stronger, and therefore shows obsessive love. The very personal view of love and its impact on the individual that we see in “First Love” can be contrasted with Christina Rosetti’s “Remember”, where the beloved is urged to find a new love when the poet is dead – “Better by far you should forget and smile”, rather than to remain true and alone – “than that you should remember and be sad”. Rossetti’s vision is of an unselfish love whereas Clare’s is obsessive and selfish in the sense that the focus is on the poet rather than on the beloved.

Join now!

John Clare also writes about love by using musical imagery “Words from my eyes did start;/ They spoke as chords do from the string”. Here shows a metaphor of words and even music springing from the intensity of his look. The poet also uses alliteration “And blood burnt around my heart”. This means his heart was on fire with desire. The alliteration “blood burnt” makes the poem sound more effective. Clare sees this love as something which is completely different from all that has gone before, “My life and all seemed turned to clay” – All his previous experience ...

This is a preview of the whole essay