All three poems begin expressing the favoring aspects of love. The first octave in Remember details a dialogue of hope and the want for 'rememberance'; 'hope' signifying endearments in the theme of love. The character in the poem is trying convince her lover to remember her through the repetition of “Remember me”, and is successful due to her rhyming schemes throughout the eight lines. The Iambic Pentameter's stressed and unstressed syllables create a rocking beat throughout the poem, this thus reflects upon the woman's need and urgency to convince her lover to remember her. The sestet of Remember expresses a completely different intention; it echoes upon the Rossetti's death approach and her selflessness towards love. This is then broken down by the caesura. The unnatural pauses can be insinuated to the rapid speed of death coming upon her, and is struggling to direct her messages to her lover. It emphasizes on the mood of the poem which would be further exhibited below.
While Remember is written with a standard meter to convey the unfaltering determination of the narrator to live and to be remembered by her lover, neither Piano nor Plena Timoris have standard meters. In the same way, neither death nor memories of childhood are instinctive drives compared to the battle against death the narrator in Remember goes through. Instead, Piano and Plena Timoris uses a very steady rhyming scheme. This rhyming scheme not only makes the poems more melodious but can represent the undying love for their own subjects. Explicitly in Piano, love is laid upon the narrator's mother; Plena Timoris shows Hardy's pessimistic outlook in life through grim imageries in association to death and the loss of love.
The three poems all have similar moods. In addition to the theme of love, the atmosphere in all three poems seem very dreary and forlorn as opposed to the light-hearted and merry mood portrayed in most stereotypes. In Piano, the emotion of nostalgia is depicted throughout the poem through the use of setting, imagery and sensory language; the reader would be able to experience the remorse the narrator feels in correlation to his yearning for the past. Remember and Plena Timoris would both have collateral approaches. Both are written with some relation to the theme of death, and therefore, despite the presence of the theme of love, they would both have a more somber and mournful outlook of love in general.
Remorse is created through sensory language, Lawrence uses much of these in Piano. For example in the line, “Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;” The use of sibilance between the words “softly”, “dusk” and “singing” create a series of very tender 's' sounds that can suggest a soothing tone to the reader's ears. The use of this tone promotes to the readers the ideal gentleness of a mother, and thus a sense of security and safety. This is extended further in the same stanza to a more vigorous sound, “… in the boom of the tingling strings”. Onomatopoeia is used here to convey the loudness of the piano through the word, “boom” in contradiction to “tingling”. Loud sounds are usually referred to when a climax is reached, this sensory depiction of the piano somewhat foreshadows a dramatic turn of events further on in the poem – the theme of death. The poem is concluded only at the last line. Lawrence had not directly implied the death of his mother, but had depicted this through tears, “Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.” The use of the word, “weep” introduces pathos to the readers; the tears of the narrator expresses the significance of his mother in his life.
In addition to sensory language, motifs are present in poems Piano and Plena Timoris to highlight on the content of the poem. In Piano, Lawrence used the imagery of a piano to represent his love for his mother, and also the memories of his childhood; the poem is able to reflect upon his remorse when he wrote this poem in 1930s. The line, “a child sitting under the piano”, portrays the attachment of the narrator and his mother's piano through “the insidious mastery of song”. The personification of music employs the sense of playfulness, but the diction, “insidious”, reveals the betrayal Lawrence felt by music. Since music is a symbol of his mother, he must have felt betrayed because his mother left him; betrayed because death took his mother, whom he loved very much, away.
In Plena Timoris, arms are important symbols to representing the shift in narration. The poem begins with a very optimistic setting. Imagery of the scene is produced through the terms “parapet-stone” and “the moon”. Readers can visualize the texture of “parapet-stones” and imagine “the moon” illuminating the sky. The first motif of an arm appears in the last line of the first verse. The “arm around her” portrays the typical intimacy between two lovers, it is a stereotyped scene that expresses the theme of love. A pivot in the narrative can be recognized in the second stanza, “'There's a woman in the canal below.'”A list of three is used to inform the reader of the death of a woman, “climbed over; slid down; let go”. The vision of a woman doing this sequential act can be visualized slowly, this creates a strong emphasis on death. The arm appears again, “till an arm upbore” Not only is this a powerful imagery to show the horror of death, but this also connects death to love in the first stanza. The third stanza in Plena Timoris presents Hardy's pessimistic outlook of life. Sarcasm is used, “so much for love in this mortal sphere!”, to emphasize on Hardy's underlying message of the frail complexities of love and that it is never everlasting as other claim it was. Personification is also in use here in the term, “mortal sphere”; a sphere cannot be mortal, this emphasizes on the sarcasm used. The next stanza also uses personification to emphasize on Hardy's point; the “heart shuddering” creates an atmosphere of dread and fear. Simile is then used to reinforce the personification. The dramatic effect leads back to the theme of death and love, where those two elements are at constant battle against each other. The motif arm appears again in the last line, “And her arm dropt from his as they wandered away.” shows a link between love, death and narrative opinion. In this case, their “wandering away” also reflects upon Hardy's hopes “wandering away”.
In contrast to both Piano and Plena Timoris, Rossetti chose to express the importance of love through the applicant of dialogue and euphemisms to dampen the effects of death. The phrase, “when I am gone away”, is the euphemism of the narrator's death; “silent land”, describes the place of 'after-life'. These are examples of the narrator pushing away the harshness of death. Most of the words used in this poem are very dark, terms like, “darkness” and “corruption”, are all related to death. Rossetti effectively puts literal meanings into use to emphasize of the effect of death against love.
All in all, the different versions of love written by Rossetti, Lawrence and Hardy is dissembled by their uses of theme, structure, poetic devices and context. Although the poets had all experienced different versions of love, and hence written their own interpretation of the theme, they have all been successful in delivering the theme of love. It is revealed that love can only be written through personal experiences, only then will the poems be able to generate emotions from its' readers.
