Comparative Essay - Love and Loss

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Amrit Morokar 11K

How can we compare and explore the themes of love and loss within 4 poems of our choice?

     This essay will be based upon the four poems “First Love” by John Clare, “Remember” by Christina Rossetti, “When We Two Parted” by Lord Byron and “A Woman to Her Lover” by Christina Walsh. Love and loss will be widely explored and compared in this essay, and we will be shown how the authors use of language and structure in each poem, can be shown to portray their ideas, regarding love and loss. 

    Here is some information about just one of our poets, Christina Rossetti. Christina Rossetti’s poems related to her, and changed since she found out that she was diagnosed with cancer. She was worried about her disease and so unfortunately died in 1894. In this essay, a discussion will be raised about the four poems, comparing how they are different, what the significance of each is, how the author expresses the theme of love and loss in different ways and the language and structure that is used to explore and express these ideas.

     “First Love”, “Remember” and “When We Two Parted” have a fixed rhyme – (ABAB rhyme). However, “A Woman to Her Lover” has free verse structure (no iambic pentameter) which was used to develop the idea of freedom because the poem is about “real love” and freedom. It is the only poem of the four that I have chosen, which doesn’t stick to any rhythm. A good example of this is when Christina Walsh says “O husband, I am yours forever and our co-equal love will make the stars to laugh with joy.” This is one way that Christina shows freedom in her poetry. “Remember” has a patriarchal sonnet, which is where the first eight lines discuss a particular idea of loss, and the last six lines offer a resolution/conclusion of that idea. “When We Two Parted” has a blank verse and uses an iambic pentameter (ten syllables per line, each alternately stressed/unstressed). An example of iambic pentameter in “When We Two Parted” is “Half broken-hearted, to sever for years.”

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     In these two poems, “First Love” and “A Woman to Her Lover”, the authors represent love in ways which they can examine the nature of love. In reading “First Love”, john Clare gives out a clear message to the readers: How it feels when we fall in love for the first time. He expresses falling in love as something magical. He describes how his legs “refused to walk away”, in other words meaning he was totally wrapped up in love and so mesmerized by her beauty that he did not actually want to walk away. “A Woman to ...

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