Contrast of pre-Twentieth Century Love Poetry

Authors Avatar

Contrast of pre-Twentieth Century Love Poetry

In the pre-twentieth century societies there were different views and approaches to love, for example contrasting approaches to virginity. In this essay I will compare and contrast four pre-1914 essays.

There are some features which may be expected to he found in pre-twentieth century poetry. For example, imagery was mainly nature-based, evolving around things such as time, weather, with religion being a popular choice as it played a much more significant part of people’s lives then compared to now. With romantic poets other themes/imagery are likely to be the cosmos, dreams, heart and soul etc. I expect the poems to be metrical, with pre-twentieth century poetry often having an iambic pentameter, in particular with love poetry. An example of a typical poem would be a sonnet used to address love, with 14 lines, an octet and sestet, iambic pentameter and nature-based imagery.

One way in which the poems differ is in their use of imagery. A good example of this is how ‘To Autumn’ (written by John Keates, considered by Tennyson as the 19th century’s greatest poet), which although not strictly a love poem, is still contains many of the features of the other poems and therefore suitable for comparison. It uses imagery to do with nature very differently to ‘The Sick Rose’ (written by Blake, regarded as a revolutionary and romantic poet). ‘To Autumn’ shows nature very positively, using words such as ‘mellow fruitfulness’; ‘rosy hue’; ‘soft-lifted by the winnowing wind’ to give pleasant, calm images of the character (autumn). This effectively portrays the character and feeling of calm, by attracting to the reader’s senses and letting us ‘see’ the scenes being described.  This calm, pleasant imagery is in great contrast to the use of nature in ‘The Sick Rose’. ‘The Sick Rose’ uses much more forceful, almost violent, vocabulary such as ‘howling storm’; ‘life destroy and ‘crimson joy’ to give a dark, ‘seedy’ image.  The phrase ‘crimson joy’ creates images of love, passion, desire, blood and danger, all very appropriate for this short, to-the-point poem. These features show the dark, morbid world of loss of virginity, and possible prostitution in London, along with diseases carried through sex which William Blake is trying to portray. I think he does this very effectively, giving a distinct, disapproving view of sex. This is very different to poems such as ‘The Flea’ and ‘To His Coy Mistress’, where the narrator is actually trying to seduce someone.

Join now!

Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I Compare thee’ is similar to ‘To Autumn’ in that it too uses pleasant, positive imagery, such as personifying summer as  ‘temperate’ and mentions the  ‘darling buds of Maie’. He uses these words to describe summer; however he says how these qualities are short-lived, unlike the character he is writing about. Written in the 1590s it would be typical for this genre to use 14 lines (split into an octet and a sestet), have an iambic pentameter and focus on nature-based imagery. However, an interesting use of imagery in this poem is at the end, when he ...

This is a preview of the whole essay