How do poets discuss love and attraction throughout literary history?
Throughout literary history poets have presented love and attraction in a variety of ways. For example one such form that love is traditionally associated with, is the sonnet. Shakespeare is an example who uses the sonnet form often, one such sonnet is Sonnet 130. Another more untraditional form is through a political statement that Christina Walsh decides to use in A Woman to Her Lover, or the powerful imagery presented as feelings in Robert Browning’s The Laboratory.
A woman to her lover is a poem that voices out the change in attitude of many women in the nineteenth century, that women should be treated as equals to men. Although she seems to be quite angry in the first stanzas, the poem does not take on a cynical theme unlike The Laboratory, in which the poem takes on a very cynical theme of the jealousy which could be involved in love. This is shown when it states, “What a drop! She’s not little, no minion like me--that’s why she ensnared him: this never will free”. This suggests that the woman may be mad that her husband is having an affair. The laboratory’s theme does not bear any resemblance to Sonnet 130’s as Sonnet 130 seems to go with the theme "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Sonnet 130 has a more similar theme to a woman to her lover as they both talk about non-physical love.
